September always feels a little bit like a second New Year to me.

Maybe it’s the back-to-school energy. Maybe it’s the shift in the light, the feeling that a new season is around the corner or the return of routines after the looseness of summer.

But I woke up on September 1st wanting to look backwards before I started looking forwards.

And, wow. This year.

I absolutely did not start 2026 thinking that by the end of the summer I would have closed down the business I’d spent more than a decade building and be sitting here with no big plan for what comes next.

The first half of this year became an unexpected reckoning.

I spent a lot of it becoming increasingly honest with myself about what wasn’t working. About what was taking far more from me than it was giving back. About the places where I kept thinking that if I could just work a little harder, solve the next problem, make the numbers work, find the right strategy, everything would eventually settle.

My birthday in March was probably the point where something really shifted.

I started asking myself less about what I should do and more about how I actually wanted to feel.

And once I started asking that question properly, there were things I couldn’t really unsee.

I could see how much energy I was spending trying to make things work that just weren’t working anymore. I could see where I was carrying things because I was capable of carrying them, rather than because I actually wanted to. I could see the gap between how I wanted my life to feel and how it actually felt. And slowly, over the first half of the year, I started making decisions from that truth.

By May, I had made some very big ones. July and August were the months I started actually living inside them.

And, at first, it was weird.

I came back to New York halfway through August after spending most of the summer in London. The kids were still home, Michael was working a lot, and I was covering most of the day-to-day home and kid stuff, so I wasn’t exactly sitting around basking in all of this newfound spaciousness.

There was also the question of what my everyday life looked like now. I had closed the business, but the kids weren’t back at school yet, so there wasn’t really a new rhythm to step into. I had made the decisions, but I was still somewhere in the middle of the transition.

For a couple of weeks, I felt like I was in a fog. Then, toward the end of August, something started to clear.

I could feel myself moving out of the period of asking What isn’t working anymore? and into sitting with what I actually want now.

And August, for all of the big existential context around it, was also just…August.

We went to the pool constantly.

I read 20 books.

We went to Coney Island.

We took the kids to museums and started working our way through the New York bucket list we made together.

We had slow days at home and days where we disappeared into the city.

We watched a movie in the park.

I got to have brunch with one of my clients who was in town.

Small, but special, things.

What I’ve been thinking about

I’ve been thinking a lot about consistency.

More specifically, I’ve been wondering whether I’ve been using the word inconsistent to describe something that is actually much more complicated.

There are things I’ve wanted to be more consistent with over the past few years. Things like writing, movement, taking care of myself and following through on little promises I make to myself.

I can be very quick to look at the gaps and think:

Why can’t I just be consistent?

But lately I’ve been asking a slightly different question.

What if I have actually been incredibly consistent for someone whose capacity has been incredibly inconsistent?

There is a difference.

If the conditions of your life is shifting, if the amount you’re carrying keeps changing, if your available energy doesn’t stay the same, surely the question cannot only be:

Why didn’t I do the thing every day?

Maybe it also has to be:

What was actually available to me here?

This is very much on my mind as we head back into school.

I know myself.

I know how quickly I can go from:

“The kids are back! I finally have some space…” to somehow becoming class parent for both kids classes, volunteering for three committees, helping with every event and wondering two months later why I have no time to write.

Nobody even has to ask me.

I will simply identify a gap and volunteer myself to fill it.

So I’m trying something different this year: making decisions about my capacity before the opportunities arrive.

I already know I don’t want to be a class parent again.

I’m already committed to being on the school’s SLT (school leadership team) and that is enough.

I already know I want some of the hours I’ve created by stepping back from work to remain mine.

Because what would be the point of fighting so hard to make room in my life only to immediately find a new way to fill all of it?

No medal is coming.

I checked.

What’s supporting me

Beans. I’m sorry.

I have somehow become a bean evangelist.

One of the things I’m paying more attention to right now is fiber, so I started meal-prepping beans at the beginning of the week so that I could easily add them to meals.

I usually have one container of chickpeas—sometimes roasted, sometimes just seasoned so I’m happy eating them cold—and another with black beans and red kidney beans mixed together.

Then I just…add beans to things.

Bowls. Eggs. Lunch. Whatever makes sense.

It is so embarrassingly simple, but I have felt so good doing this. My digestion has been so much happier, my energy has felt steadier and I’m not having to engineer some elaborate high-fibre meal every time I eat.

I’ve also been having psyllium husk regularly, which has made me realise quite how little attention I was previously paying to fibre at all.

Meal defaults

This has been one of my favourite Project 180 discoveries.

Originally, I thought I needed to become someone who planned all of her food the night before.

What I actually needed was for food to require less thinking.

So I used AI to help me create a handful of breakfast, lunch and dinner defaults based on things I already buy and genuinely enjoy eating.

Now I know that, if I rotate through those meals, I can pretty easily get where I want to be with protein and fibre without turning every meal into a maths problem.

Lunch lately has mostly meant bowls.

I meal-prep things like quinoa, sweet potato and vegetables, then add whatever protein we have—salmon, turkey, chicken—and one of my bean situations.

Even on days when we’ve been out late with the kids, dinner doesn’t have to become A Whole Thing. We can mostly just assemble something.

That is the kind of system I’m increasingly interested in.

Not one that asks me to become more disciplined.

One that removes a decision I was tired of making.

Packing food for…myself?!

I have packed approximately four million snacks for my children.

I have packed lunches for museum days, pool days, park days, train rides and flights.

And somehow, for years, I did not make the intellectual leap that I could pack food for me too.

Revolutionary.

So now, when we’re out for the day, I pack my own lunch and snacks.

This has made such a difference to my energy—and to not arriving home at 5pm absolutely ravenous and eating whatever I can find while simultaneously attempting to make dinner.

Sometimes Project 180 is a profound experiment in self-trust.

Sometimes it is: Naomi, pack your own lunch.

Being back with my things

There was also something really grounding about coming home to New York and getting back into my little evening rituals.

My acupressure mat.

My castor-oil pack.

My own bed.

My own bathroom.

The small, familiar things I reach for without really thinking about them.

I bought a huge ceramic mug while I was in London that has become one of my favourite things.

It narrows slightly at the top so everything stays hot forever, it feels lovely in my hands, and every time I use it I think about home.

I will happily spend a little more on the objects that are embedded into my everyday rhythms.

The mug you use every morning.

The sheets you climb into every night.

The pen you pick up fifty times a day.

Those things affect my life far more than the supposedly special things I use twice a year.

In season

One thing I want to get better at again is letting the seasons tell me what to cook.

When I’m really busy, cooking can quickly become another task. But when I have a little more space, I remember that I actually really enjoy it.

Buying seasonally gives me a reason to switch things up without having to go looking for novelty. It keeps me engaged with cooking and gives me something new to play with as the produce changes.

Right now I’m eating loads of raspberries and blackberries, particularly because they’re such an easy way for me to get more fibre. Pears have been making their way in too, alongside the last of the stone fruit.

From the garden, we are still eating tomatoes, summer squash and zucchini, and my tomatillos are finally starting to fill their husks.

I have so many tomatillo flowers outside right now.

So if you have a tomatillo recipe you swear by, please consider this an official request.

We’re also about to pull our carrots, while I’m planting the things that will carry us into the colder months: Swiss chard, beets, spinach, leafy greens, possibly cabbage and bok choy.

Not kale.

The grey aphids and I have concluded our relationship.

My kale was enormous and beautiful and then completely decimated. I neem-oiled. I sprayed. I fought.

I simply do not have the emotional bandwidth to enter another season of warfare with an aphid.

They can have it.

What I’m reading

I read 20 books in August, which sounds absolutely unhinged.

And before you think this is going to become one of those “How I Read 20 Books a Month” things: please know I have zero interest in turning reading into another competitive sport.

I just really, really love books.

And I’ve realized that my reading life is one of the clearest indicators of how I’m doing.

When I’m frazzled, I scroll more.

When I feel steadier, I read.

And because audiobooks count as reading in this house—this is not open for debate—I can easily spend three or four hours with a book without sitting down for three or four hours.

I listen while I’m cooking.

While I’m doing laundry.

While I’m tidying.

I read at the playground.

I read in the morning.

I read while the kids are happily doing their own thing.

The biggest “secret,” if there is one, is probably just having a TBR filled with books I’m genuinely excited about rather than books I think I should read.

One of August’s books was The Balancing Act by Nedra Glover Tawwab.

There were a lot of things about it that I didn’t enjoy, so it’s not necessarily one I’d recommend. But I found the beginning really interesting, particularly the distinction between codependency and hyper-independence.

I got one idea from it that I have kept thinking about:

You can be hyper-independent and codependent at the same time.

That landed.

Because independence doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t organising yourself around other people.

Sometimes it means:

I don’t need anything from you. I’ll handle everything myself.

while simultaneously:

I will also monitor, anticipate, compensate for and take responsibility for what you need.

Which…well.

Hello, overfunctioning.

I also read a piece by Jess Keys called Why Are We All At This Same Moment? that captured the conversations I’ve been having with so many of my friends lately—the sense that a lot of us are questioning things at the same time. I’m still sitting with it, but it’s one of those pieces I immediately wanted to send to people.

Around the house

Let’s cut to the chase.

Michael completely dropped the ball with my garden while I was in London.

I had given instructions.

There were systems.

There was a watering plan.

And still, by the time I got home, I was honestly slightly scared to go outside and properly inspect the damage.

Eventually I pulled myself together and spent about five hours out there one day, then another couple of hours the following weekend, cutting things back, clearing things out and getting everything under control.

And now I’m so happy I did.

The last summer tomatoes are still coming in.

The peppers are going.

The tomatillos are doing their thing.

And I’ve started the autumn garden.

Spinach.

Swiss chard.

Beets.

Leafy greens.

Maybe cabbage if I can emotionally recover from my previous pest experiences.

It feels strange and lovely to be harvesting one season while planting the next.

I also had grand plans for the inside of the house this month.

Paint the bathroom!

Paint the living-room trim!

Various other projects!

I did absolutely none of them.

And I’m okay with that.’

Those projects are fun for me when they feel creative.

I don’t want to turn them into another category of chores that I resent because I decided an imaginary deadline existed.

The bathroom will still be there when I actually want to paint it.

Things I’ve been loving

Summer in New York with the kids

The kids have been home for what feels like approximately 900 days, but one thing I’m really glad we did this summer was create a little New York bucket list together.

Rather than feeling like I needed to entertain everyone constantly, we settled into a rhythm where a couple of days each week became our days to go further afield.

We went to Coney Island.

We’ve done museum days.

We’ve gone to the zoo.

We’ve spent an enormous amount of time at the pool.

This week we still have the Met Cloisters and the Noguchi Museum on the list, both of which I’ve wanted to visit for ages, and we’re planning to go kayaking down the Brooklyn Promenade too.

I think having a loose structure actually helped me enjoy the summer more.

Not every day needed to become an outing.

But there were enough little adventures that it felt like we really spent the city together.

Space Jam in the park

One of my favourite nights of the entire month was taking the kids to their first outdoor movie.

It was the original Space Jam—apparently celebrating its 30th anniversary, which feels personally offensive since I remember going to watch it as a kid in the movie theatre.

Michael picked up pizza.

We brought a bottle of wine.

We sat together outside watching a movie I remember from childhood while my own children watched it for the first time.

It was one of those evenings that wasn’t extraordinary at all and somehow felt incredibly special.

A proper end-of-summer memory.

Our new neighborhood coffee shop

A beautiful new coffee shop has opened around the corner from us.

They started as a catering company and this is their first physical space. They sell homewares alongside the food, the whole place is gorgeous, and it has already somehow become part of my Friday rhythm.

I pop in first thing and bring something home.

My current favourite is their fruit scone, which changes according to what’s in season.

Right now it’s stone fruit, which, if you’ve had in season, you’ll know are just sooo good!

Seeing people in real life

One of the clients I still work with was in New York for the U.S. Open, so we went for brunch while she was here.

There is something so lovely about getting to sit across from someone you normally speak to through a screen.

No grand takeaway.

I just loved it and it reminded me how much spending time with people in person is, regardless of all the technology we have nowadays to stay connected.

Behind the scenes

Project 180 has quietly become one of the most useful experiments I’ve done in a long time.

I’ve finished the first three-week stack now, and I’m working on a proper update because there is a lot I want to tell you about what worked, what absolutely did not, and what I’ve changed for the second round.

The biggest surprise so far has probably been how often the answer isn’t:

Try harder.

It’s:

Make this easier.

Meal defaults instead of nightly meal planning.

Packing my own food.

Putting habits somewhere they can actually happen.

Making the environment do some of the work.

I’ve also started working through a list of all the things I’ve been meaning to do for myself and quietly putting at the bottom of every other list.

I finally booked the dermatologist appointment I’ve been saying I needed for years.

Which, once it was booked, took approximately three minutes and made me wonder why I had treated it like a four-year infrastructure project.

This is how so many of these things go.

I’ve also been experimenting with giving my days a little more shape.

Not a rigid schedule.

More like knowing what part of the day I’m in.

What needs doing.

Where writing belongs.

Where movement belongs.

Where the kids belong.

Where I belong.

Reducing the amount of time I spend internally debating every next move has made everyday life feel noticeably lighter.

And creatively, I’m starting to look ahead again.

I’m planning more of what I want to write here instead of continually trying to find time for it after everything else has been taken care of.

And I’m getting ready to start YouTube.

More on that soon.

I think.

😬

Looking ahead

I am very ready for September.

Mostly because the kids are going back to school.

I love them dearly but I would also like everyone to leave the house!

This will be the first school year in a very long time where both kids are in school and I am not simultaneously trying to run the version of my business that existed before and I’m curious about what that space is going to feel like.

I don’t actually want to rush to make it productive.

First, I want to exhale.

Then I want to read.

Write.

Create.

Spend more time here.

Start playing with YouTube.

Walk.

Cook.

Tend to the garden.

Figure out what my days want to become before I decide what they need to produce.

I’m also embarrassingly excited for autumn produce, farmers-market mornings and the ridiculous number of good books that always come out at this time of year.

And I’ve been thinking about how I want the house to shift with the season.

Already I’m seeing so much content about the things we apparently need to buy to “make our homes feel like fall.”

I want the feeling. I’m not particularly interested in the consumerism of it all.

I want the windows cracked open when the air finally gets crisp.

Something slowly cooking.

The garden changing.

Blankets coming back out.

Tea in my giant mug.

Different flowers.

Different food.

A stack of books.

Earlier evenings.

Candles we already own.

I’m interested in seeing how much of the season we can experience rather than consume.

Maybe I’ll report back.

This month’s reminder

You don’t have to fill the space you worked so hard to create.

I think I spent much of this year asking myself what needed to end.

What wasn’t working…

What I was carrying because I could rather than because I should…

August felt like standing on the other side of some of those decisions and realizing that an empty space can feel surprisingly uncomfortable when you’ve spent most of your life filling every available one.

So maybe September isn’t about deciding what comes next as quickly as possible.

Maybe the better question is:

What actually deserves the space that’s left?

And perhaps just as importantly— what deserves some space around it?

What are you making room for this September—and what are you deliberately leaving room around?

Thanks for being part of Life, First. If you like what you read, I’d truly appreciate it if you liked, shared, or left a comment - it makes all the difference.

This Sunday Note is arriving on a Monday, which is very on brand for the week I’ve had.

Last Monday, I had a bit of a crash out.

It was my first proper full week back in New York. The kids are still home for summer. And for the first time in twelve years, there wasn’t a business sitting underneath the week telling me where I needed to be, what needed my attention or what counted as a productive use of my time.

Which sounds incredibly freeing. And in some ways, it is.

But I’ve been learning that open space isn’t automatically a restful space. Without much structure around my days, everything became an option.

I could write.

I could work on the house.

I could take the kids somewhere.

I could read.

I could exercise.

I could work on something for Instagram.

I could rest.

I could sort out one of the approximately 738 life-admin tasks currently floating around.

And because I could be doing any of those things, I found myself constantly wondering what I should be doing.

By Monday afternoon I felt completely wired and exhausted without having done all that much.

It made me realize that perhaps I don’t actually want maximum freedom.

I want held freedom.

Enough structure that I don’t have to decide from scratch what every hour of the day is for; but enough space that I can still respond to what feels alive.

Or, as I’ve been describing it to myself this week: rhythms rather than routines.

My Taurus moon loves something dependable. My Gemini rising absolutely does not want to be told that every Tuesday at 10:17am we must perform Task A 😂

So I’ve been playing around with something in between.

Not a beautifully colour-coded schedule that becomes another thing to fail at.

More like scaffolding.

Mornings have a shape. Creative work has somewhere to live. Household things have somewhere to live. There are days where the kids and I go further afield and days where we stay closer to home. I’m trying to stop asking myself twenty-seven times a day, Should I be doing something else right now?

I’ve also been using ChatGPT to help me externalize some of that mental load. I’ve set it up so that it’s helped me lock in those rhythms on my calendar, get clear on what I actually have capacity for, where movement might fit and what meals make sense.

The aim isn’t to optimize every inch of my life.

It’s almost the opposite.

I want fewer decisions.

Fewer things I’m mentally carrying.

More ability to be where I actually am.

And it has me sitting with a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

What conditions do you need to thrive?

A somatic mentor recently gave me the analogy of a caterpillar inside a chrysalis.

There is a general amount of time metamorphosis takes, of course. But the butterfly doesn’t simply emerge because an arbitrary number of days has passed. The conditions matter.

It isn’t going to emerge into conditions that mean certain death.

I’ve been thinking about that so much, especially because I can see the same thing in my garden.

Sometimes a plant doesn’t thrive and the instinct is to assume something is wrong with the seeds.

But it’s rarely about that. Plants want to thrive and flourish. But their ability to do so always boils down to the conditions.

I think we forget to extend ourselves that same grace.

We ask:

Why can’t I be more disciplined?

Why am I not more consistent?

Why can’t I cope better?

Why am I struggling with something that other people seem perfectly capable of handling?

And increasingly I want to ask a different question.

What are the conditions that support me to feel nourished and well?

Not perfect conditions.

Life with two children will disabuse you of that fantasy very quickly.

But supportive ones.

What amount of structure helps me feel grounded?

How much solitude do I need?

How much community?

What kind of pace?

What kinds of relationships?

What does my home need to feel like?

What makes creativity easier?

What creates unnecessary friction?

I’m beginning to think knowing the answers to those questions might be much more useful than continually trying to become someone who can thrive under any conditions.

A tiny Project 180 update

This question is showing up in Project 180 too.

One of my biggest wins from my first stack has been food.

I’ve been consistently hitting around 130g of protein and 30g of fibre most days, and weirdly the breakthrough wasn’t becoming better at meal planning.

It was doing less of it.

I originally planned to map out my food every evening.

Friend, that lasted approximately five minutes.

Instead I’ve created a handful of default breakfasts, lunches and dinners that I genuinely like and that make hitting my protein and fibre much easier.

I upload my grocery receipts into ChatGPT so it has a rough idea of what’s in the house, and when I’m thinking about the next day I can basically say, I’m not in the mood for that, absolutely not eating that again, what can we do?

And we go from there.

It has taken so much mental load out of eating well.

That has probably been one of my favourite lessons from Project 180 so far:

Sometimes the solution isn’t getting better at the habit.

Sometimes it’s changing the conditions around the habit so it requires less from you.

I’ll do a proper Project 180 update soon because I’ve just finished my first three-week stack and started the next one, but I wanted to share that little piece because it feels connected to everything else I’m learning. Let me know if you have any questions that you want me to dive into on my first big update.

Mummy day camp is still in session

I’m also currently holding two completely contradictory feelings about summer.

I would like school to start immediately.

And I absolutely do not want summer to end.

I miss having the structure of the school week and having uninterrupted hours in the day.

But there is something really lovely about these much more fluid days too.

No frantic school run.

No uniforms.

No rushing everyone out of the house and then collapsing and needing an hour of recovery after they’re out.

I’ve jokingly been calling it Mummy Day Camp.

Some days that means going to a museum or something fun in the city.

Some days we’re just around the neighborhood.

This weekend especially reminded me how much I love where we live.

There were block parties everywhere. The parks were full. Families are starting to come back into the city before school begins, so we kept bumping into people from school.

One of the families on our block had a party for neighbors. Everyone grilling, drinks outside, kids flying up and down the street on scooters and bikes with water guns.

They booked an ice cream truck. There was a Michael Jackson impersonator. Naturally.

And then something else happened that felt small but wasn’t.

I bumped into one of my neighbors and admitted that, after spending basically the entire summer with the children, I desperately needed some adult conversation.

She was meeting a college friend in the park the following afternoon and immediately said, Come.

So I did.

We sat in the park drinking wine while the kids played and ate ice cream, and it was just… lovely.

And it reminded me of something I’ve had to learn the slightly annoying way.

For a long time I complained that I didn’t have enough community here.

But community requires participation.

I’ve spent the last couple of years slowly putting myself into the life around me. Talking to the neighbors. Joining our community garden. Getting to know families within a few blocks. Organizing things. Saying yes. Admitting when I’d actually like company rather than automatically saying, No, I’m good.

And I think I’ve previously imagined community as only the really deep relationships. The people who have known you forever. The person you call in a crisis.

Those relationships matter enormously but there’s another kind of belonging in being able to walk down the street and know people.

Seeing someone at the garden.

Bumping into another school family in the park.

Knowing the people a few doors down.

Someone saying, We’re going to be here tomorrow. Come.

Maybe proximity is its own kind of intimacy.

And I don’t think Sunday in the park would have happened if I’d performed being “fine.”

Sometimes honesty is the thing that lets people come towards us.

I’ve already passed my reading goal

At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal to read 65 books.

It is August and I’ve already passed it, which is slightly ridiculous.

It’s not because I’ve suddenly become more disciplined about reading.

If anything, I’ve become much less disciplined about it.

I read what I actually want to read.

That’s basically the entire strategy.

I’ve stopped feeling as though the books I read need to be impressive or useful or educational enough to justify the time.

A huge percentage of my reading is romance and urban and women’s fiction.

I regret nothing.

And instead of screenshotting book recommendations and then forgetting they ever existed, the second I hear about something that sounds good I add it to my Goodreads Want to Read list and usually request it on Libby straight away.

So I always have this enormous TBR full of books I’m genuinely excited about.

I wrote before about how differently reading feels once you stop turning it into another job, and apparently that has translated into reading more than I ever have.

Funny, that.

One other recommendation for my fellow people-who-blow-through-books:

I’ve recently signed up for Kobo Plus because I kept burning through my Everand allowance.

I’m paying $9.99/month for access to ebooks and audiobooks in the Kobo Plus catalogue, and I’ve already been getting so much use from it.

If you read or listen to books at an alarming rate, definitely have a look.

Currently…

Reading: Whatever has managed to jump the queue in my completely unreasonable TBR.

Listening to: Audiobooks while I potter around the house. This is increasingly how laundry gets put away without me feeling personally victimized by it.

Cooking: Lots of default meals—eggs, beans, roast vegetables, fish, simple proteins, big piles of vegetables. Nothing groundbreaking. Very satisfying.

Trying: Building rhythms that give the day shape without filling every available inch of it.

Enjoying: Having everyone back in the neighborhood.

Thinking about: Conditions that help me thrive.

Avoiding: Turning my new creative life into Business 2.0 in a cute outfit.

One more thing I’ve been practicing

I’ve had more conversations lately where I’ve had to say out loud:

I closed my business.

I’m taking a break.

I’m spending this season with my children.

I’m writing.

I don’t have the next thing lined up.

And I’m intentionally not rushing to find it.

Sometimes that still feels surprisingly exposing.

For twelve years I had a very easy answer to What do you do?

Now I’m living inside an answer that makes complete sense to me but doesn’t always translate as neatly to other people.

And I’m noticing how quickly the impulse arrives to explain.

To give the backstory.

To make sure people understand that the business was successful.

To mention the opportunities I could pursue.

To reassure them—and perhaps myself—that this is a respectable choice.

I’m trying not to.

Not because I suddenly don’t care what anyone thinks.

Unfortunately I remain human.

But because this season is asking me to practice something I’ve been talking about for a long time:

Letting something be true before everyone else understands it.

Maybe that is part of creating the right conditions too.

Not just changing the calendar but changing what I require from myself while I’m inside this transition.

I don’t need to emerge from the chrysalis simply because I feel awkward explaining why I’m still in it.

I can take a little longer.

I can pay attention to the weather.

I can notice what actually helps me come alive.

And, apparently, I can send Sunday Notes on a Monday.

We’re calling that growth.

I’m curious:

What are the conditions you know you need in order to thrive—not the ones you think you should need, but the ones that actually make you feel most like yourself?

Leave a comment

Thanks for being part of Life, First. If you like what you read, I’d truly appreciate it if you liked, shared, or left a comment - it makes all the difference.

And I’ve been trying to work out how I feel about it because this trip home to London felt very different to every other time I’ve left.

Normally, we’ve done loads. I’ve seen everyone, gone everywhere, packed the weeks completely full, and I leave feeling rejuvenated and ready to get back to my life.

This time wasn’t like that at all.

It was actually a really ordinary summer. And I think that’s exactly what I needed.

London became this incredibly safe place for me to unravel a little bit. To stop. To be around my mum and my sisters and people who have known me forever. To have more people around my children. To not have all of my normal rhythms and routines to fall back on.

And somewhere in all of that ordinariness, I started to see just how tired I’d been.

So I didn’t get on the plane on Wednesday feeling like, woohoo, I’m back, let’s go.

If I’m honest, I felt a little apprehensive about coming home. I still do, actually.

There’s been so much illuminated for me over these last few weeks, and I think part of coming home is trusting that I’ve actually integrated some of it. That I don’t need to be in my mum’s house in London in order to keep listening to myself in the way I’ve started to.

I don’t feel like I’m coming home as quite the same version of me who left.

And I suppose now I get to find out what that looks like here.

Subscribe now

The strange thing about going home

Leaving was emotional.

The kids were crying at the airport because they missed Daddy and wanted to see him, but also really didn’t want to leave Grandma.

Which honestly felt like my entire life personified.

They were FaceTiming their cousins from the departure gate, and I was watching them all talking and thinking about how much those relationships have deepened this summer.

For years, I was almost always the one traveling home. It was just what I did. If we were going to see family, I made the journey.

And as I’ve started pulling back from automatically being the person who makes everything happen, something interesting has happened: my family has started doing more of the traveling too.

So while I was consoling the kids, I could genuinely tell them, we’re not waiting until next summer. People are coming to us too. We’re taking turns now.

That feels really good.

London and New York also give me such different things.

London takes away most of the rhythms I’ve built for myself, which I actually think is good for me. I have to be more malleable. I can’t rely on everything being exactly how I like it in order to feel okay.

But man, oh man, does it feel good to come back to those rhythms too.

My own home. My coffee. Walking around the neighborhood. The library with the kids. My bed.

All the little things I’ve built over the years that genuinely support me.

Twenty-five years of friendship

One of my oldest friends came over to my mom’s house before we left.

We’ve known each other for 25 years, which feels frankly offensive because neither of us looks anywhere near old enough for that to be true!

She caught up with my mom, then we took the kids to the splash pad and basically just spent the day hanging out.

My kids absolutely adore her. She doesn’t have children herself, but she’s a teacher and she’s so good with them. And there is something incredibly special about watching someone who has loved you for that long love your children too.

She’ll look at one of them doing something and say, “Oh my God, you are just like your mother.”

And I’m like… oh God 😂

But she can see things in them that other people can’t because she remembers me at their age.

I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately, actually.

There have been entire years where we’ve barely spoken until I come home. And then we sit down together and it’s completely natural. There’s no big re-entry. No resentment that we haven’t been performing friendship properly enough.

And the older I get, the more I appreciate that different relationships can hold different parts of my life.

I have friends in New York who know the woman I am today. Others who I’m doing the day-to-day of motherhood with.

I have friends across the country where our friendship is essentially us sending each other 15-minute voice notes about whatever existential crisis we’re currently having.

And then I have friendships like this one. People who knew me before I was a mother. Before I was a wife. Before so many of the identities that make up my life now.

I think when I was younger I needed friendship to look one particular way in order for it to feel close.

I don’t anymore.

There’s something really lovely about letting each relationship be what it is.

Apparently this is who I am now

Never did I think I’d become the person who gets on an eight-hour flight, ignores all the buzzy new movies and happily watches Stanley Tucci wander around Italy being extremely particular about food.

But here we are.

I read What I Ate in One Year earlier this year and absolutely loved it, and there’s something about him that just delights me.

He’s bougie. He’s particular. He really appreciates quality and I love that.

10/10 plane viewing.

Also, a very Project 180 moment happened at Heathrow.

I always bring food for the kids because they hate airplane food and I don’t particularly want them surviving an eight-hour flight on whatever beige situation appears on the tray.

I hadn’t been quite as organized for myself this time, so I ended up standing in Pret cobbling together various chicken, edamame and black-bean situations to hit my daily protein and fibre targets.

And I noticed how automatic that kind of decision is becoming.

Since starting Project 180, I’m much more cognizant of the habits I’m trying to build and I’m constantly thinking, okay, what would support me here?

Nothing perfect. Nothing dramatic.

It just made choosing something that would actually make me feel good on the other side of the flight much easier.

I wrote more about Project 180 here earlier this week

What I actually needed

We got home at about 8:30 on Wednesday night, ordered pizza and called it a day.

Michael had taken Thursday off, and he had errands to run, so he took the kids with him.

Normally, this would be my DREAM.

An empty house? After being away for weeks?

I would have been like: excellent, nobody speak to me, I am about to blitz this entire house.

Suitcases emptied. Laundry going. Everything back where it belongs.

And I could feel that instinct.

But something I keep coming back to at the moment is that the medicine is usually in doing the opposite of whatever my automatic response is.

So instead of asking, how much can I get done while everyone is out? I asked myself what I actually wanted.

And what I wanted was a massive cup of coffee, an everything shower, to wash my hair, scrub every inch of my body, put on my robe, be clean and fresh as hell and watch comfort TV.

So that’s exactly what I did.

It was glorious.

I unpacked the toiletries and basically nothing else.

And yes, I could feel the part of me that wanted everything put away.

But I also knew I was going to do it.

That was actually the interesting bit.

I didn’t need to use the first available moment to prove that I would get everything done.

And then on Friday…I unpacked.

The world continued turning.

My suitcases did not become permanent furniture.

Everything got put away.

And I got the day I actually needed first.

Back in Brooklyn

Since then, we’ve kept things really chilled.

We went to the library, wandered around the neighborhood and discovered that so many things have opened while we were away.

It feels like forever since we were walking these streets.

Friday night we had dinner and put on a family movie, and all four of us fell asleep on the sofa.

At some point I woke up surrounded by sleeping people and had to start transporting everyone to their respective beds.

Which brings me to another thing I love: our sofa.

I bought our Sixpenny sofa earlier this year after selling loads of our old furniture and basically starting again with the house.

It has the down-and-feather fill and it is soooo comfortable.

One of the things I realized when I started thinking about our home differently was that I wanted the things in it to feel like a nervous system hug.

I don’t really know how else to explain it.

I want to sink into things.

I want home to feel soft.

I want everyone to pile onto the sofa and somehow end up asleep there.

So I would say that particular purchase is doing its job extremely well.

And then yesterday, one of my son’s best friends and his family came over.

They used to live a block away from us before moving to New Jersey last year, and I remember genuinely worrying that the move would change the relationship.

Somehow, it hasn’t.

We’ve spent long weekends at their house, and yesterday they wanted a Brooklyn day, so they came back to the neighborhood and spent it with us.

It was so easy.

And I think I’m especially aware of that because we’d only been home for a few days.

There was definitely a version of me who would have turned people coming over into hosting. I would have worried that I was tired and the house wasn’t quite ready and what was I going to serve and did I need to do more.

Yesterday I just…didn’t.

They came over.

The kids played.

We hung out.

Nobody needed an experience.

And it was lovely.

By about 6:30 last night, the kids and I were all asleep on my bed.

Honestly, it might have been the perfect first Saturday home.

I think that’s where I am today.

Still landing.

Really grateful for everything London gave me this summer, really happy to be back in my own home, and trying not to rush through this bit.

The suitcases are unpacked.

The fridge is slowly filling back up.

We’ve already made it to the library.

And apparently Stanley Tucci has become my idea of premium in-flight entertainment.

So I’d say we’re settling in quite nicely.

I’d love to know: what makes somewhere feel like home to you?

Leave a comment

Thanks for being part of Life, First. If you like what you read, I’d truly appreciate it if you liked, shared, or left a comment - it makes all the difference.

I feel like you can tell a lot about the hierarchy of a woman’s life by who gets cared for first.

For years, I was almost always last, and most of the time it showed up in such ordinary ways that I barely registered I was doing it.

A normal weekday would start with getting the kids ready for school, making sure they had everything they needed and reminding Michael about whatever was happening that day.

Don’t forget it’s the Father’s Day celebration at school.

Remember you need to pick up your medication on the way home.

This needs to go in Atlas’s bag.

That needs to be returned today.

Then everyone would leave; and because I work from home, I’d immediately feel this pressure to squeeze as much as I possibly could out of the few uninterrupted hours I had before pickup.

There was always a slight sense that I technically had it easier because I was at home and the kids were at school, so I should be making ‘good’ use of the time. I’d work while putting a load of laundry on, clearing up the breakfast things, loading the dishwasher and keeping half an eye on the clock because I knew that once 2pm came around, the rest of the day would move into pickup, playgrounds or the library, maybe a playdate, making snacks, getting dinner started, baths and bedtime.

Michael would come home and I’d want to hear about his day too, and by the time everyone had eaten and the kids were in bed, I was usually done.

And the funny thing is that I never thought of any of this as putting myself last. It just felt like being responsible.

I could make Michael a proper nutritious packed lunch to take to work and somehow get to school pickup without having made myself lunch at all. I could book everyone else’s appointments, remember when prescriptions needed collecting and what follow-ups were due, while something I had wanted to see a pelvic-floor specialist about sat on my own mental list for five years.

There were weeks when my hair was so dry and overdue for washing that I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time I’d properly done it. I’d obviously found the time to make sure the kids were sorted. By the evening, I just didn’t have anything left for myself.

And it went so much further than the practical stuff.

I was always trying to be a conscientious friend, remembering that this person was moving house and that person was having problems in her marriage and somebody else had a big thing happening at work. I wanted to check in, to remember, to be emotionally available. With clients, I regularly found myself giving more than I’d actually promised because usefulness and value had become so tangled together for me. I was forever researching parenting, thinking about how I could support Michael, thinking about our marriage, and how I could be a better mother, wife, a friend, and coach.

I knew everybody else’s lives incredibly well.

And when I really started looking at it, I realized there hadn’t been very much room left to know myself outside of what I meant to other people.

I wonder if you know that feeling.

You’re loved. You love the people in your life. You’re grateful for them. And somehow, when you look at the actual shape of your days, almost all of your care is traveling away from you.

There’s been quite a lot of grief for me in seeing that, and resentment too, if I’m honest. I wish I could point to one moment where I suddenly realized I had given too much, but there really wasn’t one. It accumulated over years. Being the one who remembers. The one who anticipates. The one who can handle it. The one who checks in. The one who goes over and above. The one who says yes because technically she can make three different birthday parties happen in one Sunday, even if she starts Monday more exhausted than she was on Friday.

Eventually I felt like I was drowning in resentment, which was difficult to admit because I also felt so grateful for my life. I love my family. I love my friends. I had built so much that I genuinely valued. And still, if you had asked me very plainly, Are you happy?, I don’t know that I would have said yes.

Therapy and all the work I’ve done around overfunctioning have helped me understand how I got there, and I have a lot of compassion for the version of me who learned that being useful, available and low-needs was a very safe way to move through the world.

At some point, though, I realized that understanding myself brilliantly wasn’t going to change the arrangement on its own.

I could keep explaining why I felt resentful, or, I could start paying attention to what the resentment was actually showing me.

I wanted some of my energy back.

And I don’t mean that in a scorched-earth, everybody-fend-for-yourself kind of way. I still want to love people well. I still care deeply about my children, my marriage, my friendships and my work. I just don’t want to be the one person my care reliably misses.

That is really where Project 180 began.

I started wondering what would happen if I took some of the thought, care, attention and strategy I have spent years directing towards everybody and everything else and deliberately used some of it on myself.

What would it look like to stop being the last beneficiary of my own capability?

What would it look like to show myself that I matter through the actual structure of my life, rather than agreeing with that sentiment in theory?

So, what actually is Project 180?

Project 180 is a six-month experiment I’m running from July through the end of this year, and the premise is actually pretty simple: for 180 days, I’m practicing making my own care something that happens deliberately rather than whatever I manage to fit in after everything else.

There are obviously things I’d love to change during that time. I want to feel stronger, nourish myself better and take better care of my skin and body. I want to write consistently. I want my home to feel supportive. I want movement and rest and the things that make me feel good to have a more reliable place in my life.

I have goals but I’m also very aware that I could take all of those goals and turn them into an absolutely unhinged self-improvement programme within about forty-five minutes.

Give me something I care about and I can research the life out of it. I can make the spreadsheet, buy the things, create the tracker, add twelve habits and decide that from Monday onwards I am apparently an entirely different woman.

I know how that story goes for me, which is why I wanted Project 180 to move much more slowly.

I’m working in roughly three-week blocks. At the beginning of each block, I choose a small bundle of things I want to practice, and then I actually live with them for long enough to see what happens.

I want to know whether they start feeling easier, where they keep falling apart, whether the timing works, whether I’m constantly having to remind myself and whether the habit itself is useful but the way I’ve designed it makes absolutely no sense for my real life.

And after three weeks, I look again.

The three weeks are really just a point where I stop and take stock. They aren’t some magical amount of time after which a habit should have transformed into part of my personality.

I’ve already seen that in the first couple of blocks. Some things became surprisingly easy quite quickly. Others still need a lot more thought than I want them to require long term, so they’ve stayed in the experiment for another round instead of me adding in anything new. And where I genuinely have more capacity because something else is beginning to settle, I can add another layer.

That probably sounds like a small detail, but for me it changes the whole energy of the project.

I’m not trying to get to December with an enormous list of things I can now say I do.

I want to get there and be able to look at what actually became part of the way I live.

I know how to go hard. That’s exactly why I had to build this differently.

If you are an overfunctioner, I think you probably know what I mean when I say that being able to do something and something being good for you can get confused very quickly.

I don’t need another challenge to prove that I can be disciplined. I know I can keep going when I’m tired. I know I can push through. I know I can make a plan, organize myself and somehow fit one more thing into a day that already looked full.

For a long time, those abilities were some of the things I liked most about myself, and actually, there’s still a lot that I value in those parts of me. I’m resourceful. I’m strategic. If something needs figuring out, give it to me and I will probably figure it out.

I’m just trying to stop automatically deploying those parts of myself every time something is difficult.

I keep reminding myself that, for me, the medicine is often in doing the opposite.

So when I got to the end of the first three-week block, I didn’t look at everything I had done and immediately ask what else I could add. I asked myself whether the things I had chosen were actually becoming more integrated.

Because if I can technically complete six habits while still having to manage, negotiate and force myself through all six every single day, I’m not sure I’ve built anything I particularly want to maintain.

I already know I can carry a lot.

What I’m curious about now is what happens when I stay with something long enough for it to start carrying some of its own weight.

That has made even very small acts of care feel different.

Making myself a proper lunch before I leave for school pickup, for example. It sounds almost laughably basic when I write it down, but previously I would so easily think, I’ll sort myself out later, collect the kids, make their snack and then realise I was picking bits off their plates because I still hadn’t eaten properly.

Or going for my walk even though the house isn’t exactly how I want to leave it, the kids are calling “Mommy, Mommy,” and I know there is a very real possibility that the house will be in even more chaos when I get back because Michael is significantly more relaxed about these things than I am.

I go anyway.

Or booking a lab work appointment in the middle of the day while the kids are at school, eating into my work time, even though it’s inconvenient. Finding the pelvic-floor specialist I have somehow didn’t give myself the time to book for five years. Blocking out a writing session and telling the kids, “I’m setting you up with something fun to do, but this is Mommy’s writing time now. If it isn’t urgent, you’re going to have to wait until I’m finished.”

Do you know what happened?

They were fine.

That sounds obvious, I know. But I’m noticing how many of these moments are teaching me that my care doesn’t have to wait until every other legitimate need has disappeared, because that day is never coming.

There will always be another load of laundry, a message I could reply to, something one of the kids would like me to do, another piece of work I could finish, another thing around the house that would genuinely benefit from my attention.

The competing priorities are real. That’s exactly why this has been harder than simply knowing what to do.

Project 180 is making me ask a slightly uncomfortable question: does everything else still get automatic first access to me simply because it matters too?

And I don’t know exactly where that question is going to take me yet.

I already know there will be things I used to fit in that I may no longer have capacity for once I stop treating my own needs as the flexible part of the schedule.

That feels like part of the experiment too.

If you want to try this with me, this is where I’m getting into the part I probably would have wanted to read when I first came up with Project 180.

• Below, I’m sharing the five decisions I make at the end of every three-week block (including what I do when a habit still hasn’t stuck), what I’m learning about the tiny ways I still leave myself until later, and the slightly nerdy things I’m measuring that have nothing to do with maintaining a perfect streak.

• I’m also showing you the GPT systems I’m using so this doesn’t become another thing I have to remember and manage, what has already been much harder than I expected, and the exact framework I’d use if you wanted to create your own Project 180 without copying any of my habits.

And I’ll be documenting the experiment here over the next six months — including what falls apart, what I change, what gets another three weeks and what I’m learning in real time.

Read more

I’ve been following the Lindsay Clancy trial from London this summer.

There are details of that case that I don’t feel qualified to adjudicate, and questions far bigger than anything I’m trying to answer here. Three children died. Nothing I write about motherhood should blur the enormity of that.

But I’ve found myself unable to look away from one particular part of the testimony.

Some of the most difficult things to hear have also been some of the most ordinary.

Parts of Lindsay’s journals have been read aloud in court.

“I’m completely overwhelmed.”

“I’m drowning every day.”

“I feel guilty.”

She wrote about being completely drained taking care of her children. About feeling guilty that she was spending her family’s money and not making any. About returning to work. About her baby’s sleep. About worrying whether sleep training was the right thing to do.

And I think that’s partly why so many mothers seem unable to look away from this case.

Not because we recognize ourselves in what happened to those children. I want to be extremely clear about that.

It’s because some of the thoughts surrounding what happened sound so horribly familiar.

I’m overwhelmed.

I’m exhausted.

I’m worried I’m getting this wrong.

I need help.

Those aren’t extraordinary sentences in motherhood.

And perhaps that’s the part I’ve been struggling to make sense of.

A mother was struggling.

She was asking for help.

And around that fact sits a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

What do we actually mean when we tell mothers to ask for help?

Because we say it all the time.

Tell someone.

Ask your partner.

Call a friend.

Build your village.

Speak to your doctor.

Don’t try to do everything yourself.

All good advice.

But what happens after she asks?

Who changes their life?

Who takes something off her plate?

Who notices what needs doing before she has to assign it?

Who becomes responsible for something that used to belong to her?

And what if the help she receives allows her to keep functioning without ever actually relieving her of the thing that is breaking her?

I think there is a difference between helping a mother and making sure she is no longer carrying so much.

I’m not sure we talk about that difference enough.

Subscribe now

Sometimes functioning is the thing that hides how much you’re carrying

I know this because I have spent most of my life being extremely good at functioning.

And motherhood rewarded that quality in me immediately.

When my children were very small, my husband was working a lot. Often on weekends too.

He wasn’t some monster refusing to parent his children. He was becoming a father too. He loved them. He worked hard for our family.

But I don’t think we entered parenthood in the same way.

He got to gradually become a father.

I became a mother all at once.

I remember hearing Michelle Obama talk about this years later and feeling so validated by it.

She described becoming a mother and watching Barack continue to find time for things like going to the gym or playing gold while her own life had been completely reorganized around their children.

It wasn’t that he didn’t love his children or wasn’t becoming a father.

His life just hadn’t been disrupted in quite the same way hers had.

And goodness, I knew that feeling.

There were things that still seemed optional to Michael that simply didn’t feel optional to me.

He could decide he wasn’t really in the mood for the playground that morning.

Meanwhile, my brain was already going:

They’ve been awake since six. They need to get out. They need to move. They need the sensory play. If we stay inside all morning, what is the rest of this day going to look like?

Neither of us had sat down and decided this was my responsibility.

It just was.

And I keep coming back to this question:

Why can becoming a father and becoming a mother still represent such radically different degrees of life disruption?

Because I was already the capable one in our relationship, I think we both assumed I would be capable here too.

I had always been the person who figured things out. Before children, there hadn’t been many moments in our relationship where Michael needed to step in and carry me. If anything, the dynamic generally ran in the opposite direction.

Then we had two children in two years.

And somehow the fact that I could cope became evidence that I should.

I remember waking up in the morning already nervous because Michael would be leaving for work soon.

Not because anything terrible was happening.

Because I knew what the next ten or twelve hours required.

The baby would need her first nap around nine.

Would she go down?

Would my toddler stay calm for long enough for me to cuddle her to sleep?

If she didn’t sleep properly, what would that do to the rest of the day?

If we were going out, I had to get everyone dressed. Pack spare clothes. Snacks. Bottles. The sterilized binky. Nappies. Every possible thing two tiny children might require once we’d crossed the threshold.

We live in a Brooklyn brownstone, so leaving the house meant getting the double stroller down the stoop, then getting both children down, then strapping everybody in while one was becoming impatient because getting ready had taken too long and the other was starting to cry because why, exactly, were we still standing on the pavement?

And we hadn’t even gone anywhere yet.

Then someone would fall asleep in the stroller at precisely the wrong time.

Do I wake her?

Do I let her sleep?

Will she take the next nap?

What happens to bedtime?

Meanwhile my toddler needs something.

Someone is teething.

Someone has a rash.

Someone has a fever.

Someone only wants Mummy.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I’d look at the clock.

Four hours until Michael gets home.

I can still remember what four hours felt like.

That is the part of early motherhood I don’t think I had language for at the time.

The relentlessness.

Not necessarily catastrophe. Just the absence of an off switch.

And I was also running a business.

Because I worked from home, there was this strange assumption that work and childcare could somehow occupy the same physical space.

At one point I said I wanted us to hire a nanny so I could actually work.

It became an argument.

From Michael’s perspective, I was home. I was good with the kids. I always figured things out. Why spend the money if I could technically manage?

And he wasn’t entirely wrong about the last part.

I could manage.

That was the problem.

Capability can become camouflage

This is something I’m only really understanding now.

Sometimes a functioning mother looks at herself and assumes she must be okay because she’s functioning.

Other people do it too.

She’s getting everybody where they need to go.

She’s working.

The children are fed.

The forms are signed.

She remembers the birthday party.

She knows which child will eat which snack and which one absolutely will not.

She knows their shoe sizes without checking.

She knows which stuffed animal is required for which emotional emergency.

She knows that this cup is acceptable but apparently the identical cup in the other colour is an insult.

She knows the little idiosyncrasies that don’t appear on any family calendar because nobody has ever needed to write them down.

They live in her.

And because everything keeps moving, everybody assumes the system works.

Including her.

But functioning tells you very little about what functioning costs.

Sometimes your body is simply keeping you going because there is no other option.

I’ve noticed this every summer when I come home to London.

There are things I can feel here that I can’t always feel in New York.

At home, I have to function.

School pickup is still happening. Dinner still needs making. Somebody needs something from the pharmacy. There is work to do. There are forms and WhatsApp messages and appointments and laundry and groceries and all the ordinary maintenance of family life.

My brain knows this.

So it keeps going.

Then I come here.

And my body seems to realize: Oh. We can put some of this down now.

My mum wakes up with the kids so I can sleep.

My sister takes them for the day.

Another sister has them for a sleepover.

Someone makes dinner.

Someone notices that the kids will want a snack when they get home and makes the snack plate before anyone asks.

I sit in my mum’s garden.

I listen to an audiobook in the bedroom with the door closed.

I take ridiculously long showers.

I soak in the bath.

Sometimes I do absolutely nothing.

And it is often here, when I am safest and most supported, that I realize how tired I actually am.

Because survival doesn’t always feel like falling apart.

Sometimes survival looks incredibly competent.

I thought being a good mother meant anticipating everything

There was another layer to all of this for me.

I wasn’t only trying to keep my children alive and the household functioning.

I was trying to do motherhood correctly.

Baby-led weaning.

Sleep.

Attachment.

Screens.

Emotional regulation.

Gentle parenting.

Respectful discipline.

How the New York City school system works.

I joined Dr. Becky’s Good Inside community.

I read Dr. Shefali.

I followed the parenting accounts.

If the children were asleep and I had twenty minutes to myself, there was a good chance I was using those twenty minutes to learn how to parent them better.

Which is almost funny to me now.

My break from mothering was researching motherhood.

My mum laughs at me about this all the time.

She’ll tell me I don’t need to Google or ChatGPT everything.

You have a mother. I’m right here.

Or, when I’ve disappeared down another parenting rabbit hole:

Naomi, relax. Stop pathologising everything.

And obviously there is so much about parenting that I’m grateful we understand now that previous generations didn’t.

But my mum has said something else to me this summer that I keep thinking about.

“No wonder your generation of mothers feels so overwhelmed. You have access to so much information. There is a term for everything. An expert for everything. An account explaining everything.”

Sometimes it feels like motherhood has become something else we’re supposed to study for.

And for someone like me, there is a particular problem with knowing more.

Once I know something, it can very quickly start to feel like another responsibility.

Something else I now need to implement.

Because underneath all that research was something much more tender.

I loved these children so much that I wanted to eliminate the possibility of hurting them.

If I read enough, understood enough, anticipated enough, regulated myself enough, perhaps I could avoid fucking them up.

And I think a lot of conscientious mothers are carrying some version of this.

The job is no longer simply to love your children, feed them, keep them safe and raise them with reasonable amounts of kindness and common sense.

You should understand attachment theory.

You should co-regulate.

You should repair.

You should protect their nervous systems while regulating your own.

You should provide enriching experiences.

You should understand sensory needs.

You should watch the screens.

You should serve the right foods.

You should hold boundaries calmly.

You should know when behavior is developmentally appropriate.

You should somehow do all of this while remaining emotionally available, financially productive, physically healthy, romantically connected, socially engaged and preferably well rested.

Which is another reason Lindsay’s journal entries caught me.

The worries about whether her baby was sleeping properly. The concern about sleep training. The fears around getting it wrong.

Again, none of those ordinary worries can explain what ultimately happened.

But I recognized the mental terrain.

The sense that there must be a right answer.

That if you could just find it, perhaps everything would be okay.

How much capacity does being a “good mother” require now?

And who has that capacity?

Asking for help isn’t the same as being relieved of responsibility

I keep coming back to this distinction.

Because technically, I had help.

Michael helped.

Eventually we hired childcare.

Friends helped.

My family helped from thousands of miles away however they could.

But there is a kind of help that still leaves one person as the central operating system.

You tell me what you need.

Ask me if you’re overwhelmed.

Give me a list.

Tell me what to pack.

Tell me what time the birthday party starts.

Tell me what they eat.

Tell me what size they wear.

Tell me what needs doing and I’ll happily do it.

And sometimes that is genuinely useful.

But the mother is still thinking.

Still anticipating.

Still delegating.

Still noticing.

Still holding the master copy of everybody’s life in her head.

The task moved.

The responsibility didn’t.

I’ve been reading All the Rage by Darcy Lockman this summer, and one phrase from it has lodged itself in my head:

“At least he helps.”

We hear women say versions of it all the time.

He’s really good. He helps.

He does bath time.

He helps around the house.

He’s much more involved than his dad was.

And there’s something about the word help that I can’t stop thinking about.

Men don’t tend to say:

“At least she helps.”

Because helping implies there is a primary owner.

Helping with whose job?

I understand now why my mum’s care feels so different.

She doesn’t usually ask me how she can help.

She looks.

She notices.

She knows I don’t get lie-ins at home, so she wakes up with the children.

My sister visited us in New York earlier this year and started doing school pickup.

She’d seen enough of our afternoon rhythm to know the children came home hungry, so sometimes the snack was already being made.

Nobody was waiting for me to become sufficiently overwhelmed and then produce instructions.

They were participating in the noticing.

That is a different kind of care.

To be considered without first having to make your need legible.

I think that’s what I mean now when I talk about wanting a village.

I don’t just want more people available to help me execute motherhood.

I want other people “mothering” too.

A couple of years ago, my body finally waved the white flag

For a period of time, I was having frightening physical symptoms.

My blood pressure was extremely high. I was sweating profusely. My eyes were incredibly sensitive. I was wired and exhausted and barely sleeping.

Doctors were investigating my thyroid. At one point Graves’ disease and hyperthyroidism were possibilities. Thankfully, that isn’t what it turned out to be.

But one night I became scared enough that I went to the hospital.

I hadn’t slept properly in days.

Eventually, a doctor gave me something to help me sleep.

He warned me that I would probably be groggy the following morning. I wasn’t going to be getting up and carrying on as normal.

And do you know what my immediate concern was?

My son’s Mother’s Day celebration at school happening the next day.

I remember thinking:

I can’t take this medication.

What if I’m too groggy tomorrow?

What if all the other mothers are there and his isn’t?

I was sitting in a hospital after my body had been screaming at me, frightened and exhausted, and part of me was still calculating whether taking care of myself might disappoint my child.

Maybe that’s why another small detail from the Clancy testimony has stayed with me.

Weeks before her children died, Lindsay had been receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment. According to testimony in the trial, she asked to leave a day early so she could be home for her daughter’s birthday party, and the discharge was approved.

Our circumstances were nothing alike, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But that maternal reflex felt familiar to me.

Something important is happening for my child. I need to be there.

Even when you are the person who needs looking after.

Even when your body or your mind is asking you to stop.

Even when there are other people perfectly capable of loving your child through your absence.

I know that calculation because I’ve made it too.

Eventually I had to tell myself something that sounds incredibly obvious from the outside:

The way I can be a good mother to him right now is to take care of myself.

Michael could go.

Our son would have a parent there.

I needed to sleep.

Around the same time, it was my daughter’s fourth birthday.

And some of the mothers I’d become friends with in Brooklyn looked at what was happening and essentially said:

You’re not doing this.

One would make the cake.

Someone else would help set up.

They started taking pieces of it.

The old version of me would have protested.

No, no, honestly. I’m fine.

Because I didn’t want to burden anyone.

Because she deserved a lovely birthday.

Because I was her mother.

Because somewhere inside me, I still believed love was demonstrated by how much I was willing to carry.

But I remember having this very clear thought:

You’ve spent years saying you don’t have a village. Your village is showing up. Are you actually willing to let them?

That turned out to be its own kind of work.

Increasing my capacity to receive.

I am having to rethink what sacrifice has to do with good motherhood

This is still uncomfortable for me.

I don’t spend much time worrying that other people’s perception of me as a mother.

My fear is much more private than that.

I’m afraid I’m not doing enough.

That if I’m not attuned enough, involved enough, anticipating enough, researching enough, present enough, then perhaps I am withholding something my children need.

I’ve even noticed it financially.

For most of our relationship, I earned more money than my husband.

For the last couple of years, that changed.

My income reduced significantly, and now I’ve closed the business I spent more than a decade building.

There is some recurring income, but right now I am leaning on my husband financially in a way I haven’t before.

And I’ve felt guilty about that.

Which is why another line from Lindsay’s journal stopped me.

She wrote about feeling guilty that she was spending her family’s money and not making any.

I understood that immediately.

Not her circumstances.

Not what happened afterward.

Just that strange internal accounting where the amount we feel entitled to need can somehow become connected to the amount we’re financially contributing.

I’ve felt it too.

Guilty paying for therapy.

Guilty spending money on my health when health issues came up.

Even things like yoga or acupuncture—things that genuinely supported my wellbeing—could trigger this little calculation in my head.

Am I contributing enough to justify this?

Which is fascinating when I consider how many years I contributed the lion’s share financially without ever calculating whether everybody else had earned the right to be cared for.

Apparently I had absorbed another rule somewhere along the way:

If I’m contributing less money, perhaps I should require less.

Less care.

Less spending.

Less support.

Less room.

And motherhood has forced me to confront how easily “being a good mother” can become another language for self-abandonment.

Because sacrifice is part of parenting.

Of course it is.

Sometimes somebody has a fever and your plans disappear.

Sometimes you spend Saturday morning somewhere you absolutely do not want to be because your child does.

Sometimes you give them the last good strawberry.

This isn’t an argument for a motherhood untouched by inconvenience or sacrifice.

It’s about what happens when sacrifice stops being something motherhood occasionally requires and becomes the measure by which we decide whether a woman is devoted enough.

Maybe the village isn’t supposed to help the mother carry everything

Maybe the village is supposed to carry some of it.

That distinction feels enormous to me now.

Because I think we’ve built an entire conversation around helping women withstand impossible levels of responsibility.

Regulate your nervous system.

Have better boundaries.

Ask for help.

Create systems.

Make time for yourself.

Get up before the children.

Go to therapy.

Use the app.

Make the list.

Delegate.

Communicate your needs.

And again: I use many of these things. I believe in many of these things.

But I keep wondering whether we’re helping women become better at coping with the load while remaining strangely incurious about why so much of the load belongs to them.

Even our solutions can become another task for the mother.

Find the therapist.

Research the parenting approach.

Interview the nanny.

Build the village.

Explain what you need.

Schedule the self-care.

Communicate more clearly.

Learn to receive.

Regulate yourself so you can return to regulating everybody else.

At some point we have to ask a more uncomfortable question.

Who benefits when the most capable woman in the family simply becomes even better at carrying?

Because perhaps she doesn’t need another strategy for carrying it.

Perhaps somebody else needs to pick something up.

And perhaps this is the part of “ask for help” I hadn’t interrogated enough before.

Asking is important.

But surely asking is supposed to be the beginning of the response, not the response itself.

What happens after she asks?

Who starts paying closer attention?

Who checks again tomorrow?

Who changes what they’re doing because she cannot continue doing everything she was doing before?

Who takes ownership rather than waiting for another instruction?

At what point does her distress become something the people around her respond to, rather than another problem she is expected to manage well?

London keeps teaching me this

I’m writing this from my mum’s garden.

My children are somewhere in this house, or perhaps out with one of the many people who love them. I genuinely don’t know exactly what they’re doing as I write this.

That sentence would once have made me uncomfortable.

This summer I’ve had moments of guilt because, if I’m being completely truthful, I haven’t always been the most present, attuned mother here.

I’ve been going through a lot.

There are enormous changes happening in my professional life and other parts of my life too.

Some days I have needed to disappear into a bedroom with an audiobook.

Or sleep.

Or sit outside.

Or simply not be the person everybody needs.

And my children have been fine.

More than fine.

They’ve been adored.

Their aunties take them out.

They have sleepovers.

My mum feeds them.

People play with them.

Someone else listens to the long story.

Someone else gets the snack.

Someone else notices.

And maybe that is part of what I had misunderstood about the village.

A village isn’t valuable because it creates more capacity for the mother to continue doing motherhood exceptionally well.

A village creates more people for the children to belong to.

More relationships.

More arms.

More homes.

More adults who know which snack they like and which stuffed animal matters.

More places for them to be known.

And in the process, the mother gets to belong to herself sometimes too.

I’m starting to think that may be one of the greatest gifts we can give our children.

Not a mother who never stops attuning to them.

A mother who knows she doesn’t have to disappear in order to love them well.

And I think this is why I keep returning to those journal entries from the beginning of this piece.

Not because I think the ordinary pressures of motherhood explain what Lindsay Clancy did.

They don’t.

There are questions about her mental state and criminal responsibility that a jury is being asked to answer, and that I am neither qualified nor interested in answering here.

I keep returning to them because so much of the language around her distress sounds like language we hear from mothers every day.

I’m overwhelmed.

I’m exhausted.

I’m drowning.

And I wonder whether we’ve heard those words so many times that sometimes we no longer hear what they’re saying.

How distressed does a mother have to become before her distress stops being treated as an unfortunate but ordinary part of motherhood?

How much does she have to drop before we stop admiring how much she can carry?

I don’t know.

But I think we should be asking.

Maybe being a good mother was never supposed to require one woman becoming inexhaustible.

Maybe the question isn’t whether we’re capable of carrying it all.

A lot of us already know we are.

Maybe the question is why we keep mistaking our ability to carry something for evidence that it should be ours to hold.

Thanks for being part of Life, First. If you like what you read, I’d truly appreciate it if you liked, shared, or left a comment — it makes all the difference.

Leave a comment

Every morning for the last few weeks, my mum and I have had our coffee outside in the garden before the kids wake up.’

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. We sit in the same spot, usually in our pajamas, and talk about whatever we didn’t finish talking about the night before. Eventually one of the kids appears from the kitchen and the day begins.

But this week, I’ve found myself noticing these moments more.

We fly back to New York on Wednesday, and I’ve reached that point in the summer where everything suddenly feels evermore precious because I know it’s about to end.

It’s funny because when I think about what I’ve loved most about being home this year, it isn’t really any of the big things we’ve done.

It’s been watching my kids ride their bikes and scooters around the same green I played on when I was their age. Them jumping on our next-door neighbour’s trampoline. Spending entire days at the local pool. Staying outside until late because the evenings are still light, then falling into bed absolutely shattered.

It’s my mum’s house being the revolving door it has always been.

My cousin popping over with his baby, even though we’d only seen them the week before.

Realizing that this time last summer he was only a few weeks old and now he’s crawling around my mum’s kitchen floor.

It’s my sister staying over. Family appearing without much notice. Coffee in the garden. Food from my mum’s garden. The kids being surrounded by cousins and aunties and people who have known me since I was their age.

My mum found some of my old journals this summer that she’d kept for me. One of them is from when I was ten. She’s also been pulling out little things of mine that she saved all these years that I can now give to Shiloh.

And then this week Shiloh lost her first front tooth.

I don’t know what it is about the front teeth, but they get me every time. Suddenly they look so much older. Atlas lost one of his front teeth while we were here last summer too, which has made it feel like another accidental little marker of these long summers at home.

Maybe that’s why leaving feels particularly tender this year.

Every summer, before we go through security at the airport, I take the same photo of my mum with the kids at the gate. My phone resurfaced last year’s photo this week and I found myself looking at how much they’ve changed in twelve months.

You know intellectually that your children are growing. That your parents are getting older. That babies become toddlers and families change and everybody builds lives of their own. But then occasionally life gives you a before-and-after picture and you actually have to look at it.

There’s a particular kind of nostalgia I feel when I’m here because this house holds so many versions of my life.

I was a child here.

Now my children spend their summers here.

And for these few weeks every year, I get to slip back into something I don’t really have anywhere else. I’m still a mom, obviously. I still have responsibilities. But I’m also somebody’s daughter again. My mom is upstairs. My sisters are nearby. Somebody is always popping in. There are more hands, more people, more history.

I think that’s the part I find hardest to leave.

For years, this point in the summer would make me question everything. Should I have moved away? Would life be easier if we lived closer to family? Are we doing this all wrong?

And sometimes there is grief there.

Moving away means I’ve missed ordinary Tuesdays. My kids don’t get this version of family life all year round. My siblings and cousins have grown up, found partners, had babies, moved around. Christmas doesn’t look exactly like it did when we were children. It couldn’t.

I think I’m finally learning, though, that missing something doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve made the wrong choice.

I love London.

And I love our life in Brooklyn.

Both are true.

I’ve built something there that I’m genuinely excited to go home to. Friends who have become family. Other mums I can share pickups and basketball runs with. Neighbours I can text on a scorching Saturday morning and have their kids running through our sprinkler an hour later. My community garden. Book clubs. Block parties. Drinks with girlfriends. Our little corner of Brooklyn that, slowly and almost without me noticing, became home too.

Maybe that’s part of growing up: realizing your heart can belong to more than one place without requiring you to choose which one counts.

So instead of spending these last few days wondering whether I should move back home, I’ve been asking myself a slightly different question:

What is it that I love about myself here?

I love how much we’re outside.

I love the looseness of our days.

I love coffee in the garden and people popping over and children disappearing outside to play.

I love how little I care about productivity here.

I love being surrounded by people I don’t have to schedule three weeks in advance to spend time with.

I love being someone’s daughter.

And I’ve been thinking about which pieces of that are London—and which pieces I can bring home with me.

Because I’m also starting to crave home.

My own bed. My kitchen. My things. My garden, which Michael assures me is alive, although the photographic evidence he’s been sending feels suspiciously strategic.

My rhythms.

I already know that when we land on Wednesday night, I’ll set the coffee pot before I go to bed so that when I wake up Thursday morning, there will be coffee waiting in my own kitchen.

I can’t adequately explain how happy that thought makes me.

Maybe that’s the strange gift of having two places you love.

You get to leave with a lump in your throat.

And you get to be excited about where you’re going.

Subscribe now

On my reading pile

My Black romance book club has finally chosen our August read and we’re reading Score by Kennedy Ryan, the second book in her Hollywood Renaissance series.

I bought it pretty much as soon as it came out and then deliberately didn’t read it, which is very unlike me where Kennedy Ryan is concerned.

I discovered her last year and proceeded to work my way through a frankly ridiculous amount of her back catalogue in about a month. I read all three books in her Skyland series in three days. Proper staying-up-until-stupid-o’clock-even-though-I-have-children reading.

I genuinely can’t remember the last time an author had sent me down a rabbit hole like that.

So I’ve been saving Score because I knew I’d want to inhale it, and now I have the perfect excuse. We’re meeting at the end of the month to discuss it, which also means I have a deadline to stop “saving” it and actually crack it open.

My August reading list is getting slightly out of hand in general.

I’ve just picked up Nightbitch from the library after one of the women in my other book club raved about it. I have to say, the blurb has not convinced me, but she loved it so much that I’m willing to trust her.

I also really want to read Jenny Jackson’s new book, The Shampoo Effect. I loved Pineapple Street — although I’m aware that book was VERY Marmite — and I’m currently number two-hundred-and-something on the library waitlist, so I suspect I’m going to cave and buy it.

There’s also Where the Wildflowers Grow, Annabel Monaghan’s latest because her books are exactly the kind of easy, feel-good romance I want in the summer, and Maggie Haberman’s new book on the Trump presidency because apparently my reading personality is: Black romance, women slowly losing their minds, and 500 pages of political reporting.

Range.

Something I can’t stop thinking about

Speaking of women slowly losing their minds...

I read a Marie Claire piece this week about the shift from the girlboss to the “girlbaby” — essentially, the cultural swing from I can have it all, do it all, build it all to a growing fantasy of opting out of responsibility altogether.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Partly because I’m also reading All the Rage by Darcy Lockman, which looks at the unequal division of labour between mothers and fathers, and there was one observation in the book that really stopped me.

So much of the equality movement was built around the idea that girls can do everything boys can do.

Girls can have careers. Girls can earn money. Girls can lead. Girls can occupy all of these spaces that historically belonged to men.

But there wasn’t an equivalent cultural project around teaching boys:

You can do everything girls have traditionally been expected to do, too.

The cooking. The cleaning. The remembering. The appointments. The childcare. The emotional and relational work that keeps a family running.

Which means that for a lot of women, equality didn’t necessarily redistribute the existing load; it added to it.

And this keeps bumping up against a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

Are we actually questioning the load women are carrying, or are we just giving women increasingly sophisticated ways to cope with it?

Get a better system.

Set better boundaries.

Regulate your nervous system.

Use this planner.

Use AI.

Communicate your needs more clearly.

Ask for help.

I believe in plenty of those things. God knows I use them. But there’s something about constantly locating the solution inside the woman carrying too much that I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with.

And then I look at the cultural pendulum swinging all the way from girlboss to girlbaby, or the fascination with tradwife content, and I wonder what the swing itself is trying to tell us.

I’m not convinced that we’ve all suddenly stopped valuing independence.

I wonder if some of what we’re seeing is exhaustion with the version of independence we were handed.

Because if the offer was essentially you can do everything men have traditionally done while remaining responsible for much of what women have traditionally done... perhaps it’s not surprising that fantasies about not being the infrastructure anymore have started to look appealing.

Anyway. I have many more thoughts about this than will fit into Sunday Notes, and I’m still working them out.

But it’s a question I’m sitting with.

From the kitchen

Meanwhile, the food situation around here has been wonderfully low stakes.

We’ve been eating loads from my mum’s garden, and I remain on my current inexplicable mission to sauté every leafy green I encounter. Bok choy. Chinese cabbage. Anything I can throw into a pan for five minutes and call a side dish.

My mum and I have also finally found what she calls “the Kardashian salad.”

You know those enormous salads they’re forever shaking around in plastic bowls on The Kardashians?

That.

Except ours are basically very good Sweetgreen-esque bowls from a place near my mum. Salmon, steak or chicken… loads of vegetables, really good dressings. Whenever neither of us can be bothered to cook, we’ve been getting those, and I’m already plotting how to recreate a few of them at home.

She also made me a proper roast lamb this week because lamb is weirdly harder to come by in the States and there are few things more nostalgic to me than an English roast with all the trimmings.

And finally: fudge.

Last summer we went to Cornwall and I somehow came home without Cornish fudge, a mistake I have apparently been thinking about for an entire year.

I have rectified the situation.

No further notes.

Tiny upgrades, surprisingly big difference

I tinted my eyebrows for the first time this week and WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

I used the Eylure eyebrow tint, which comes with two little tubes that you mix together, paint onto your brows, leave for about ten minutes and wipe off.

That’s literally it.

I didn’t expect it to make that much difference because I already fill my brows in, but having that extra colour and definition there before I’ve put anything on my face has made such a difference.

It’s exactly the kind of thing I’m interested in experimenting with as part of Project 180: little bits of maintenance that make everyday life easier.

Or, as the kids say, high maintenance to be low maintenance.

I’ve ordered an at-home brow lamination kit for when I get back, so obviously I’ll report back on whether that ends in beautifully laminated brows or regret.

I’ve also been putting together a small skincare order because pigmentation is one of the things I want to be more intentional about over the next few months.

Currently in the cart: Paula’s Choice 2% BHA for my face, their 2% BHA body treatment, and Topicals Faded.

Also, despite transporting an entire makeup bag across the Atlantic every summer, I have barely worn makeup since I’ve been here.

Brows, sunscreen, maybe my Merit Flush Balm in Fox.

That’s apparently the whole operation.

What I didn’t buy

Another very unexpected development: I normally bring an extra suitcase to London specifically because I know I’m going to shop while I’m here.

This year I’ve bought exactly three things.

All from the Massimo Dutti sale.

That’s it.

Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly building what I think of as my grown-woman wardrobe around three words:

Elevated. Textured. Comfortable.

Comfort has become completely non-negotiable since having my kids, but I still want to feel put together. I’ve also become much fussier about fabric. I try to buy natural fibres, look secondhand before buying new, and generally would rather wait and buy something I really love than pay good money for polyester that I don’t.

I’ve built it slowly — usually picking up a few things when I’m in London during the summer and then again around Black Friday — and I think I’ve finally reached this funny point where there isn’t anything particularly urgent missing.

I’ve seen things I like.

I just haven’t felt much desire to buy them.

Which is quite the development for someone who normally arrives at Heathrow having literally allocated luggage space for hypothetical purchases.

One thing I noticed this week

I’m learning that being reliable doesn’t require being endlessly available.

I’ve been noticing how strange it can feel to simply do what I said I was going to do.

To show up. Keep my commitments. Care deeply. Do good work.

And then... stop.

No scanning the horizon for something extra I could offer.

No anticipating a need before anyone has expressed it.

No finding another way to demonstrate that I’m useful.

I’ve realized that sometimes what I’ve called “going above and beyond” hasn’t only been generosity.

Sometimes it’s also been reassurance.

If I keep giving, nobody can be disappointed.

If I’m constantly adding value, nobody can question whether I’m doing enough.

If I stay available, I don’t have to wonder whether anyone is upset with me.

So I’ve been asking myself a question that I suspect I’ll be returning to for a while:

Am I responsibly tending to this commitment, or am I trying to manage how everyone feels about me?

There is a difference.

I’m learning how to let the work be enough.

How to let care be care without continually using my presence to prove it.

Still very much in process with this one.

Before we go

We have three days left in London, and they’re looking exactly how I’d want them to.

My mum, my sisters and I are going to Columbia Road Flower Market, one of my favourite places in London. I obviously can’t take any plants home, but this has never stopped me enthusiastically choosing plants for other people.

We’ll get coffee, wander around, probably have lunch somewhere in Shoreditch.

My sister is staying over and we’re planning to start Gossip Girl from the beginning because apparently this is how grown women with children choose to spend their precious free time.

My mum is taking the kids to see Blippi.

And pretty much every day between now and Wednesday, someone from the family is popping in to see us before we go.

Then Wednesday, we fly home.

We always take the daytime flight back to New York, which means the children are allowed essentially unlimited screen time because my sole parenting objective for those eight hours is:

DO. NOT. FALL. ASLEEP.

We land in the evening, put everyone straight to bed and wake up on New York time.

And then Thursday morning, I will unpack.

Immediately.

This is apparently a divisive personality trait, so I’d like it on record that I am firmly in the suitcase gets unpacked immediately camp.

Weekend away? Unpacked.

Eight-hour transatlantic flight with two children? Unpacked.

I cannot relax knowing there is a suitcase somewhere in my house containing a chaotic mixture of dirty clothes, chargers and half-used toiletries.

And after that, I’ll be heading outside to assess the garden.

Michael has assured me repeatedly that everything is alive.

He’s also been sending me photographs as proof, although I have some concerns about how strategically these photographs have been framed.

Long-time readers may remember that last summer I returned to approximately half of my garden dead, so the stakes are high.

Assuming there are, in fact, still plants to garden, I’ll harvest whatever is ready, get everything back under control and start sowing for autumn.

And then we’re back into Brooklyn life.

August block parties. The community garden. Book club. Friends. Neighbours. Late summer evenings outside.

The other village.

I think that’s what I’m most grateful for as we pack up this week.

I don’t have to pretend leaving London doesn’t hurt in order to be happy about going home.

I’m going to miss coffee outside with my mum.

I’m going to miss hearing people come through the front door.

I’m going to miss watching my children run around the place where I was once a child.

And I’m also really looking forward to Thursday morning.

My bed.

My kitchen.

My garden.

And the coffee pot I’ll have very sensibly set the night before.

Two things can be true.

And right now, I’m very grateful that they are.

See you from Brooklyn next Sunday x

“Have you ever actually existed in uncertainty for any meaningful length of time?”

At first, I assumed the answer was obviously yes. Of course I had. I’m thirty-six. I’ve moved countries, changed careers, built a business, become a wife, become a mum. My life has contained plenty of uncertainty.

But the longer I sat with the question, the less sure I became.

When I looked back over my life, I realized I had rarely stayed in uncertainty for very long. I was usually preparing for the next stage before the current one had finished.

At university, I was already writing and styling for different publications and building experience in the industry I wanted to work in after graduating. I went straight from university into my first proper newspaper job, an editor role at a big national paper. Even while I was building that career, I had other things going on at the side. By the time I eventually left my full-time job, I had already been working on my business for a while.

I’ve always liked to cover my bases.

I prepare. I build the bridge before I need to cross it. I try to make sure the next thing is waiting before I release the current one.

From the outside, it has often looked like discipline and good planning. And it was all of those things. That approach helped me build a career and a business I’m incredibly proud of.

I’m beginning to see that it was also one of the ways I created a sense of control.

Even when I was in one chapter, I was already working on the next. There was always another direction, another project or another identity taking shape in the background. I rarely had to stand at the end of something and admit that I didn’t know what came afterwards.

That’s what feels so different about this season.

Professionally, I’ve stepped away from the business I spent twelve years building. There are things I’m curious about, ideas I’m exploring and threads I keep finding myself drawn towards, but there isn’t a neat new plan waiting in the wings.

I haven’t replaced one business with another.

I haven’t created a new offer.

I haven’t decided what the next five years are supposed to look like.

For once, I’m trying not to rush into the next chapter simply so I can feel the comfort of knowing where the story is going.

I’m changing personally too.

I’ve been with Michael, my husband, for more than eleven years, and lately I’ve been thinking about how little we talk about what happens in long relationships when both people keep changing. We spend so much time talking about finding the right person. We talk much less about learning the same person over and over again.

I’m not the woman he met in New York all those years ago, and he isn’t the same man either. Some of those changes happen so gradually that you hardly notice them until one day you realize you’re asking different questions, wanting different things or relating to one another in a new way.

Motherhood feels different too.

This summer, a woman came over to me at the pool and smiled as she watched Atlas and Shiloh running around together.

“You’ve got the easy stage now,” she laughed, envious.

She had a toddler who needed watching every second. Meanwhile, I was sitting on the edge of a sun lounger with my audiobook playing in one ear while Atlas and Shiloh disappeared between the pool and the playground. Every so often they would come running back, dripping water all over the place, asking for a snack before taking off again.

I remember sitting there thinking, When did this happen?

One day you’re carrying a diaper bag stuffed with wipes, spare clothes and snacks, while keeping one eye on a toddler who seems determined to launch themselves towards danger. A few years later, you’re watching two children disappear off together while you finally manage to listen to another chapter of your book.

Nobody announces that you’ve crossed into a new season.

Life changes quietly like that.

So when I say I’m in a period of transition, I don’t only mean work. It feels like several parts of my life are shifting at once, and I don’t yet know exactly what they are shifting into.

That brings me back to the question the practitioner asked me.

Have I ever really stayed in uncertainty?

Or have I always been busy creating the next piece of certainty before the current one ran out?

I thought being prepared would keep me from being surprised

I’ve started to notice how often I treat uncertainty like something that can be solved through enough preparation.

I don’t think I have ever consciously believed that planning could guarantee the future. It has been much quieter than that.

It sounds like: Let me think this through properly.

Or: Let me make sure I understand all my options.

Or: Let me find someone who has already done this and ask what they would recommend.

All reasonable things. All useful in the right context.

But when I look closely, I can see that sometimes I’m gathering information and sometimes I’m trying to remove the feeling of uncertainty from my body.

Those are not always the same thing.

When uncertainty shows up, there are a few places I tend to go.

I research. I look for the book, the podcast, the expert, the course or the person who has already been through whatever I’m facing. I want to understand what they did, how long it took, what went wrong and what they would do differently.

I plan. I think through the different outcomes and try to create a response for each one. I like knowing there is a contingency. Even when life changes direction, I want to feel that I have already considered the possibility.

I move. Action often feels easier than waiting. Starting something, fixing something or making a decision gives all that nervous energy somewhere to go.

I borrow certainty. Sometimes I’m asking for advice because I genuinely need another perspective. Other times, I think I’m hoping someone else will sound sure enough for both of us.

I even do this with restaurants.

Michael finds it ridiculous.

I can’t simply book somewhere. I’ll read the reviews, look at the menu, find TikTok videos of the food, study the photos and compare it with three other places nearby. Then, after all of that, I may still ask Michael which one he thinks we should choose.

On the surface, I’m trying to find somewhere nice for dinner. Underneath it, I’m trying to remove one small pocket of uncertainty from the day.

What if somewhere else is better?

What if we spend the money and the food is disappointing?

What if I make the wrong choice?

Once I noticed that pattern in something as ordinary as choosing a restaurant, I started seeing it everywhere.

I don’t think I’ve spent all these years trying to predict the future. I think I’ve been trying to make sure the future doesn’t surprise me.

If I can imagine enough possibilities, gather enough information and prepare thoroughly enough, perhaps I can soften the impact of whatever happens next.

When I looked at it that way, I felt a lot of compassion for myself.

It makes sense that competence became comforting. It makes sense that being prepared helped me feel steady. It makes sense that movement often felt safer than standing still long enough to realize I didn’t have an answer.

The difficulty is that life keeps refusing to give us the one thing all that preparation is reaching for.

A guarantee.

No amount of planning removes uncertainty completely. No amount of competence lets us know today what can only be revealed tomorrow.

And I think this is why I’ve spent so much of my life looking externally for guidance; I’m trying to speed up the process of uncertainty.

Tell me what you did.

Tell me how it worked out.

Tell me how long the uncomfortable part lasted.

For a moment, someone else’s certainty gives me somewhere to stand.

I’m beginning to wonder how much energy I’ve spent trying to solve tomorrow before tomorrow arrives.

Perhaps uncertainty itself hasn’t been the most exhausting part.

Perhaps it has been the constant attempt to get ahead of it.

If this is feeling familiar, the rest of the essay is where I go deeper into what uncertainty has looked like in my actual life—and why I’m slowly beginning to see it differently.

I write about leaving London for New York without knowing where it would lead, the books and films that have changed how I think about alternate lives and “right” decisions, and the privilege and responsibility involved in allowing myself a season without a five-year plan while raising two children in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

I also share what I’m trying instead of rushing towards another identity, including the very ordinary experiments that are helping me pay attention to the life I already have.

Paid subscribers can continue reading below.

Read more

Every part of me wanted to save this for a week that felt lighter.

A week where I had funny stories to tell, lots of little adventures to share, or something that tied itself up neatly by the end.

And it’s interesting to notice because, despite how much work I’ve done over the last few years, that instinct is still there. The instinct to tidy everything up before I share it. To make sure there’s a neat takeaway. To wait until I’m on the other side of something before I write about it.

But that’s not really what I want this space to be.

So I’m going to tell you the truth instead.

This week has felt hard.

There have been moments where I’ve caught myself wishing I could just disappear for a year and recover. I haven’t particularly wanted to talk, mother, or be responsible for much of anything. I think I’ve just wanted somewhere that felt safe enough to come undone for a little while.

Not because I’m crashing, or because everything’s fallen apart. It’s actually felt like the opposite.

I think what’s happening is that my nervous system finally feels safe enough to stop holding everything together.

Coming home to London always does that for me.

For most of the year, I’m in New York, away from my family and my closest support system. I love our life there, but I’m also the default parent, holding a lot most of the time. And my body knows it.

Being back here is different.

My mum and my sisters are loving up on the kids. I’m being looked after as much as they’re being looked after. And especially after everything I’ve been processing since closing my business, being home is the one place where it feels safe enough to stop bracing, recover, and fully integrate it all.

So that’s what I’ve been letting myself do.

I’ve had almost no expectations of myself, and I’ve been letting that be okay.

My mum bought us matching kaftans to try and keep cool in the London heat, and we’ve spent afternoons sitting outside in the garden with a midday prosecco, talking… and not talking. Just sitting together while the kids play.

We’ve eaten almost every meal outside.

I’ve read four books.

I’ve lounged.

And I’ve done as little as possible.

Anyway… here’s this week’s notes.

Subscribe below and I’ll send Sunday Notes (and my essays throughout the week) straight to your inbox.

Project 180

I’ve started something I’m calling Project 180.

The basic premise is that, for the next 180 days, I’m making myself the project instead of pouring all of my energy into everything and everyone else.

I’m not doing it because I’m trying to fix myself. I’m trying to see what can happen if I give myself the same care, attention and devotion that I’ve spent years giving everyone else.

I started by asking myself what I actually want, how I want to feel, and where I’d like to be at the end of the 180 days. Then, rather than trying to overhaul my entire life at once, I worked backwards and broke those things down into a few small habits that I can focus on for around three weeks at a time.

At the end of each three-week period, I’ll check in with myself. Did I follow through on the things I said I wanted to do? If I did, great. If I didn’t, I want to get curious about why. Was I trying to do too much? Did the habit not fit into my actual life? What would make it easier for me to support myself next time?

The whole point is to make real changes to the way I take care of myself without overwhelming myself or turning it into another project where I’m trying to transform overnight. I want enough time with each habit for it to become part of how I live, rather than something I do intensely for a week before moving on to the next thing.

I’m documenting the process for myself as I go, but if you’d be interested in hearing more about what I’m learning, what’s changing and how it’s all going over the next 180 days, let me know. I’d be happy to make it a regular part of Sunday Notes.

Leave a comment

A few things I’ve been noticing

Adulthood comes with so many open tabs.

There are the obvious things, but then there are all the little pieces of life admin that sit in the back of your mind: the account you need to close, the appointment you need to make, the form you need to fill in, the email you need to answer, or the thing you’ve been meaning to sort out for weeks.

I’ve had quite a few of those recently, and this week I’ve started closing some of them, one by one. None of it is particularly exciting, but I can feel how much space each unfinished thing has been taking up in my mind, because every time I deal with one, I feel a little lighter.

I think it’s also made me realize that when things fall by the wayside, it isn’t always because we’re careless or disorganized. Sometimes our capacity has been stretched for so long that something has had to be dropped.

There may be inconveniences or consequences that come with that, but sometimes dropping a ball is the decision we have to make for our own wellbeing. And then, when we do have a little more capacity again, I don’t think shaming ourselves for everything we didn’t manage is particularly helpful.

I’m trying to support myself to take one small action, close one of those loops, and then move on to the next one when I’m ready.

What I’ve been reading

I’ve read four books this week, which has felt amazing.

I’ve also noticed that when I’m not feeling my best, I tend to consume far more content. I can be reading a book while listening to an audiobook and still find myself scrolling at the same time, jumping from one thing to the next and somehow ending up feeling both wired and tired.

I’ll even find myself watching videos of people talking about the books they’re reading instead of actually reading one of the many books already sitting on my TBR.

So this week, whenever I’ve noticed myself reaching for my phone or about to go down another content rabbit hole, I’ve been trying to remind myself to stop watching people talk about the activity and actually go and do the activity.

Sometimes that has meant going outside and sitting in the garden without anything playing in my ears. Other times it has meant making sure I have a book lined up so that when I feel the urge to scroll, I can pick that up instead.

It’s probably a big part of why I managed to read four fast-paced, really enjoyable books this week.

I’ve also been loving the Everand app. As someone who reads as much as I do, buying every book individually would cost me a fortune, so I use Libby heavily for ebooks and audiobooks through the library, and I also love Libro.fm because you can choose an independent bookshop to support with your purchases.

Everand has been another really good option because it has a wide selection of ebooks and audiobooks for a monthly subscription, so it’s especially useful if you get through a lot of books. They have a free trial too, so it’s an easy one to test before deciding whether it’s useful for the way you read.

Around the garden

My mum was really inspired by my goal of becoming as self-sufficient as possible with produce, so she planted a lot in her garden this year, and while I’ve been in London I’ve been helping her take care of it.

We’re now in full-blown harvest mode, so almost every day we’re picking tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and whatever else is ready, and we’ve been having Greek salads constantly with lots of salt and really good olive oil.

The difference in flavour between something you’ve picked when it’s actually ripe and what you usually find in the supermarket is huge, especially with tomatoes, and you also get access to so many more interesting varieties.

I know growing food can feel like one of those things where you have to go from zero to one hundred, start everything from seed and suddenly know what you’re doing, but you really don’t. You can go to your local nursery or even a grocery store, buy one tomato start, put it in a pot and begin there.

I’m already thinking about what I want to plant in my fall garden because, even though it sounds counterintuitive, a lot of fall crops need to be started during the summer so that they have time to get established.

I’m also really missing my own garden in New York. Michael has been FaceTiming me to show me what’s ready, and never did I think I’d be the person asking my husband for vegetable updates while I’m overseas, but he’s been harvesting full-sized aubergines, zucchini and so much else, and I’m very excited to get home and see it all for myself.

One way I’m trying to reduce the mental load

One of the things I’ve been looking into this week is how I can use AI to help with some of the everyday parts of motherhood and running a home.

We use Instacart for most of our groceries, and before I fly back to New York I always start doing a deep replenishment of the pantry and the household basics. Michael is home, so he’ll receive everything, but I’m normally the one thinking through what we’ve run out of, what needs replacing and what we’ll need when the kids and I get back.

I tend to use the summer to get some of our household systems back in place, so I’ve been exploring how I can use ChatGPT and its integrations to help me organize things like that Instacart order and take some of the thinking out of it.

I’m not interested in using AI to replace my own judgement or to optimize every part of my life, but I am interested in anything that can take some of the repetitive mental load off my plate and free up a bit more space in my mind.

I’m still getting familiar with what’s possible, so I’ll let you know whether it ends up being genuinely useful rather than just another piece of technology that creates more work.

Use code NPOWELL1A0B2 or use this link for $10 off your next order on Instacart

Things I’m trying

I’ve kept my skincare routine quite simple for the last few years, which means I need the products I do use to work really hard for me.

Recently, though, I’ve felt like my skin has changed and the routine I’ve been using isn’t giving me the same results anymore, so I’ve been going down a skincare rabbit hole and trying to understand what my skin needs now.

My skin is oily, my pores are quite visible, and I’ve recently learned the term sebaceous filaments, which are the small collections of sebum and dead skin cells that naturally sit inside the pores. They’re especially noticeable around the nose and cheeks, and they can look like tiny grey, beige or darker dots.

I’ve ordered a few products containing salicylic acid and other BHAs, which can get into the pores and help with the buildup of oil, and I’m going to start testing them once I’m back home.

I’ll report back on how I get on, especially for anyone else in the oily-skin, visible-pores club who wants a routine that is still fairly simple. Let me know if there’s any products you swear by.

Leave a comment

Something bringing me joy

There’s an amazing splash pad close to my mum’s house that we’ve been taking the kids to.

The water is only around knee height, so it feels really safe, and there’s also a huge playground in the same area. We’ll have a slow morning, eat breakfast and then head out at around ten with a little cooler full of snacks and ice lollies, and we can easily stay there through the morning and into the afternoon.

There are parents sitting around on deck chairs and picnic blankets, children running between the water and the playground, and all the laughter and squealing that comes with lots of children playing together in the summer.

I shared a picture of it on Instagram and had so many messages from people saying it reminded them of their own childhoods, and I know exactly what they mean. There’s something about the smell of the sunscreen, the ice lollies and the children being in and out of the water that feels really nostalgic.

It’s been a nice reminder that it isn’t always the big trips or elaborate plans that children remember. Sometimes it’s spending the whole day at the splash pad, being lathered in sunscreen and running around with other children until it’s time to go home.

And while they’re playing, I’ve been able to sit nearby with my headphones and a book, keeping an eye on them while getting some reading done, which has made it a pretty good day for all of us.

What I’m writing in

I’ve been using the same notebooks for about seven years now, and I don’t think I’ll ever switch.

They’re from a small American company called Appointed, and if you’re a fellow notebook snob, I can’t recommend them enough. I’ve tried so many over the years, and these are still my favourite. They’re beautifully made, the paper is gorgeous, and they’re just one of those things that make me want to sit down and write.

One of the unexpected things about being back at my mum’s house is that she’s kept so much of our childhood. While I was here, I came across a journal I kept when I was about ten years old, and I lost the best part of an afternoon reading through it.

It was such a strange feeling to get a glimpse into what mattered to me then, what I was worried about, what I was excited about and how I saw the world.

It also made me think about the journals I’m filling now.

I’m in such a significant season of change that I know my future self will be grateful to have them. Not because everything I’m writing is profound, but because it’s honest. It’s the ordinary days, the questions I’m asking myself, the things I’m learning and the moments that would almost certainly be forgotten otherwise.

And then I found myself thinking about my own daughter.

Lately, I’ve been asking my mum what life felt like for her in her late thirties and forties. What she was worrying about, what motherhood felt like, what she remembers about those years. It made me realize that one day my daughter will probably have those same questions for me.

I love the idea that she’ll be able to open these notebooks one day and find my actual thoughts waiting for her.

If you’re in a season of change, I’d really encourage you to keep a journal. Not because every entry needs to contain some huge breakthrough, but because you’re living through a version of your life that you’ll never get back. It’s a place to put the things you’re noticing, the lessons you’re learning, and all the little pieces of yourself that might otherwise get lost to time.

Appointed are actually running a sale at the moment, and I also have a discount code so I’ll leave both linked below if you’re looking for a notebook you’ll genuinely want to write in.

Code THELIFESTYLEEDIT gets you 15% off at checkout

That’s it from me this week.

I’d love to know what has been supporting you lately, or whether there’s anything from these Sunday Notes that you’d like me to share more of.

And let me know if you’d be interested in following Project 180 over the next six months. I’m still in the very beginning of it, but I have a feeling there will be a lot to share as I work out what it actually looks like to make myself the recipient of my own care.

Leave a comment

Since then, one of the questions I’ve been asked most is, “When did you know it was time?”

The honest answer is that I’d known for a while.

Not because there was one dramatic moment where everything suddenly became clear. If anything, it was the opposite. It was something I’d been quietly noticing for years, long before I was ready to do anything about it.

I think one of the hardest things about being someone who’s always been capable is that you become incredibly good at enduring. When you’ve spent your life being disciplined, responsible and seeing things through, “this feels harder than it used to” doesn’t automatically register as a signal. It just feels like something to push through.

Overfunctioners develop an extraordinary tolerance for carrying things. We don’t just endure difficult seasons; we often mistake endurance for evidence that we’re on the right path. So even when something no longer fits, our instinct isn’t to listen. It’s to grip a little tighter.

Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t the business that had changed. I had.

Over the last five and a half years, therapy has helped me understand myself in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I started my business at twenty-five. I began recognizing patterns I’d never had language for before: over-responsibility, emotional labour, hyper-vigilance, the tendency to make myself as low-maintenance as possible while making space for everyone else.

Once I started seeing those patterns in my personal life, it became harder and harder not to notice them everywhere else too.

In my friendships.

In my marriage.

In motherhood.

And eventually, in my work.

Looking back, I can also see something I couldn’t have seen when I started the business.

I had built a business around some of the very strengths that had helped me survive.

Reading between the lines.

Holding space.

Anticipating what people needed before they’d said it.

Those qualities made me a deeply invested coach. But they also meant the business rewarded the very patterns I was beginning to heal.

About two and a half years ago, I started pulling back from the parts of the business that required the most emotional proximity to me. They were also the parts generating the most revenue.

The difficult truth was that the business was never quite the same afterwards.

And somewhere in that process, I had to admit something that was uncomfortable to say out loud:

Some of the success I’d built had been tied to how much of myself I was willing to give away.

That wasn’t a judgement of the business.

It was simply something I could no longer unsee.

The more I’ve sat with this chapter, the more I’ve realized this isn’t really a story about closing a business.

It’s a story about what becomes visible when something you’ve organized your life around comes to an end.

I don’t have neat conclusions yet.

But I do have a few things I’ve found myself coming back to.

Here are a few things I’ve been noticing.

What follows is less about closing a business and more about what happens when the life you’ve known no longer fits, but you don’t yet know what comes next.

Read more

Every summer, the kids and I come back to London for six to eight weeks. It’s where I grew up, and now it’s become one of my favourite traditions of the year. We stay with my mum, which means the pace of life looks completely different to the one waiting for us back in Brooklyn.

There have been plenty of big outings—the zoo, Legoland, taking the kids to see The Lion King—but, if I’m honest, it’s the ordinary moments I’ve loved the most. Making lunch together. Eating outside whenever the weather allows. Watching the kids disappear into the garden while my mum and I potter around, usually with a cup of tea not too far away. She’s been inspired by all the gardening I’ve been doing at home this year, so I’ve happily appointed myself keeper of her flower beds while I’m here.

I’d imagined I’d write much more while I was away. Instead, I’ve found myself wanting to be exactly where I am. Present with my family. Present with this season. I don’t think I’d realized quite how much I needed that.

Another big milestone happened while I’ve been here: after months of conversations, decisions and paperwork, I officially closed the doors to my business. It feels strange writing that sentence after so many years. There’s far too much to say for a quick catch-up, so I’ll save that story for another essay, because it’s brought up more reflections than I could possibly fit into a few paragraphs.

One of the things I look forward to most about being here every summer is reading.

I usually try to get as much work done as I can before we come, which means that once we’ve settled into the rhythm of the holidays, my days feel much more open than they do for the rest of the year. The kids disappear off to play, Mum heads out into the garden, someone puts the kettle on, and I find myself reaching for my Kindle.

I’ve always loved reading, but over the past few weeks I’ve realised that it isn’t just the amount I’m reading that’s changed.

It’s my relationship with books altogether.

I’ve always loved reading

I’ve always loved books.

As a kid, one of my favourite things was being left in WHSmith while my mum did whatever she needed to do. I could happily sit on the floor for hours, completely surrounded by books. I loved reading, of course, but I also loved just being around books. Even then, they felt full of possibility.

As I got older, the kinds of books I reached for started to change. I discovered personal development, spirituality and psychology, and it felt like someone had opened a door I didn’t know existed.

I grew up with a lot of financial instability, and these books gave me something I desperately needed at the time: hope. They introduced me to the idea that your circumstances didn’t have to determine your future. That your beliefs mattered. That you could create a different life.

I’m genuinely grateful for that. I don’t think I’d be the person I am today without many of those books.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

Reading stopped feeling like leisure.

Without really noticing, it became another thing to work at.

The psychology books became business books. Then health books. Then parenting books. Then nervous system books.

There was always another title someone recommended. Another expert who had a perspective I hadn’t considered. Another book I added to my basket because everyone seemed to agree it was one of those books you simply had to read.

And slowly, reading started to feel less like something I wanted to do and more like something I ought to be doing.

I’d force myself through books I wasn’t enjoying because I’d already started them.

I’d glance at the growing pile of unread books and feel guilty that they were still sitting there.

Sometimes I’d even wonder whether my attention span had become so bad that I just wasn’t capable of finishing a book anymore.

Looking back, I don’t think that was the problem at all.

I think I was approaching books in exactly the same way I’d started approaching so many other parts of my life.

I started wondering what I was really looking for

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the idea of chasing your potential—how easy it is to spend your life searching for the next version of yourself without ever arriving where you already are.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized my relationship with books had become part of that story too.

I don’t think I was buying another parenting book because the last one hadn’t taught me anything valuable.

I think there was a part of me that believed there must always be something else I didn’t know.

Another perspective.

Another insight.

Another habit.

Another piece of information that would help me become a better parent, a better business owner, a healthier person, a wiser human being.

It wasn’t really about the books. It was about the belief underneath them. That wherever I was… couldn’t quite be enough.

When I look back now, I can see how often I reached for books from that place.

The critically acclaimed novel that I felt like I should have read by now.

The classic that every well-read person seemed to have on their bookshelf.

The book everyone was talking about.

The one on someone’s annual reading list that made me think, I really ought to read that.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t always choosing books because I was curious about them.

Sometimes I was choosing them because I liked what reading them said about me.

That feels surprisingly vulnerable to admit. Because at the time, I never would have described it that way. It all felt so sensible. So subtle. So normal.

But I started noticing the same pattern that had shown up in other areas of my life.

There was always another book.

Always another expert.

Always another thing to learn.

And eventually I realized I wasn’t struggling because I lacked information.

I was struggling because I wasn’t giving myself the chance to live what I already knew.

For women like us, I don’t think the biggest challenge is access to information anymore.

We are surrounded by it.

If anything, we’re overflowing with information.

What I’ve started wondering is whether the real challenge is integration.

Whether we’ve become so accustomed to searching for the next insight that we rarely stop long enough to ask what it would look like to fully inhabit the ones we’ve already found.

That question has changed the way I think about reading.

And, as it turns out, it has changed the kinds of books I reach for too.

One of the biggest shifts has been giving myself permission to read the books I actually want to read.

The ones that completely pull me in. The ones where I look up and realize two hours have disappeared. The ones where I promise myself just one more chapter, only to realize it’s somehow midnight.

For me, that’s romance. A little bit of smut. Books that are pure escapism.

For years, I don’t think I fully let myself enjoy them because there was still a part of me that believed I should be reading something more worthwhile. Something more literary. Something that sounded more impressive when somebody asked, “What are you reading at the moment?”

It sounds slightly ridiculous writing that down.

But I know I wasn’t the only one.

Somewhere along the way, I started asking myself different questions.

What books do I think I should be reading?

Who decided that?

If nobody else ever knew what I was reading, would I still choose this book?

Those questions changed far more than my reading list.

They gave me permission to trust my own curiosity again.

I joined a book club around the same time, and strangely, it reinforced that lesson even more so.

If the book of the month doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t read it. A few years ago I would have forced myself through it because I’d committed. Now I simply skip that month and wait for the next one.

Reading gets to be one of the places in my life that feels joyful.

It doesn’t have to become another exercise in endurance.

That shift has taught me something else I wasn’t expecting.

I used to think I went through reading slumps. Now I think they’re usually telling me something

When I’m feeling grounded, I disappear into books. I lose track of time. I don’t think about checking my phone. I don’t need to convince myself to keep reading because I’m completely absorbed in the story.

When I’m overloaded, it’s a completely different experience.

I’ll read the same paragraph three times. I’ll suddenly decide I should just check Instagram for a minute. My brain feels noisy. Even picking up a book I’ve been genuinely excited about starts to feel like another thing I have to do.

That’s become one of my biggest tells that my nervous system is carrying too much.

Sometimes a book I’ve had on hold for weeks finally becomes available on Libby, and instead of diving straight into it, I keep putting it off. And a while ago I would have assumed I was in a reading slump, but now I usually stop and ask myself:

What’s making pleasure feel difficult to access right now?

Because that’s what I’ve realized is actually happening.

When I’m overwhelmed, it’s not just reading that becomes harder.

It’s joy.

It’s gardening.

It’s sitting down with a coffee.

It’s all the things that usually help me feel like myself.

Reading has simply become one of the places where I notice it first.

And in a strange way, that’s made me incredibly grateful for it.

It’s become less about finishing books and more about paying attention to myself

I’ve realized that reading has become one of the few moments in my day that is completely for me.

I certainly haven’t found more hours in the day. If anything, life is as full as it’s always been. There are still lunches to make, children to get out of the door, work to do, messages to reply to and all the invisible jobs that come with running a home and looking after a family.

The difference is that I’ve stopped automatically giving every spare pocket of time away.

For years, if I found myself with twenty minutes, my mind would immediately start scanning for the most useful thing I could do with it. I’d tidy something. Catch up on life admin. Reply to messages. Scroll for a bit while mentally planning everything else that needed doing. There was always somewhere that time could go.

These days, I’m a little more intentional about reclaiming some of it.

Sometimes that looks like sitting next to Michael with my Kindle while he watches something I’m not interested in. Sometimes it’s listening to an audiobook while the kids are happily playing at the park. Sometimes it’s making a coffee before everyone wakes up and reading a few chapters instead of instinctively reaching for my phone.

None of those moments are particularly extraordinary.

They’re tiny moments.

But they add up to something much bigger.

Every time I choose one of them, I’m reminding myself that my joy matters too.

That it doesn’t always have to be about making the most productive choice, or squeezing one more thing into the day, or using every spare minute in service of someone else.

Sometimes I get to choose something simply because it fills me up.

And for someone who spent a lot of her life believing that usefulness was the safest place to exist, that shift has been huge.

And I think that’s probably why some of my reading habits started changing too.

One of them was learning to stop reading books I wasn’t enjoying.

That sounds so obvious now.

A few years ago, I couldn’t have done it. If I’d bought the book or started it, I’d have felt like I had to see it through. Even if I wasn’t enjoying it. Even if picking it up started to feel like another thing on my to-do list.

These days, I usually give a book about a hundred pages. Sometimes less if it’s obvious we’re just not a good match. And then I stop.

It sounds like such a small thing.

But I think, for so many of us who pride ourselves on seeing things through, it’s actually surprisingly hard.

And I’ve realized it’s because I wasn’t just finishing books.

I was finishing books for the same reason I’d stayed in situations long after they’d stopped feeling good.

I’d confused finishing with virtue.

These days, I ask myself a much simpler question:

Am I actually excited to pick this back up?

If the answer’s no, I move on.

I can’t help wondering what would change if I asked myself that question in a few more areas of my life too.

There are a few other things that have made reading feel joyful again.

I’m a mood reader, so I almost always have a few books on the go at once. That way, whatever mood I’m in, there’s usually something I’m excited to pick up.

I keep my Kindle in my bag because it’s so easy to pull out if I’m on the bus or waiting somewhere. I almost always have an audiobook on the go too, so if I’m gardening, walking or tidying up, I can carry on with the story.

I also love wandering around bookshops without buying anything.

People always seem to find that a bit strange.

But I don’t really see how it’s any different from browsing in a clothes shop or Sephora. You’re not necessarily going because you need to buy something. You’re seeing what’s new. You’re discovering things you didn’t know existed.

I do exactly the same thing with books.

If something catches my eye, I’ll read the blurb, have a quick look at the reviews and add it to my TBR list on Goodreads, or request it from the library.

Talking of libraries, I honestly don’t know what I’d do without mine.

I read far too much to buy every book, so I use Libby, which lets you borrow ebooks and audiobooks from your local library. I’ve probably become slightly obsessive about library cards too. I have my Brooklyn one, my New York Public Library one, Queens… basically every one I’m entitled to, because it gives me a better chance of finding the books I want without waiting forever.

The kids and I go to the library after school quite a bit as well, which I love because I really want them to grow up seeing the library as somewhere exciting to be and it gives me a chance to see if anything piques my fancy.

Joining a book club has been another unexpected joy.

Of course it helps me keep up with my reading.

But more than that, it’s just fun.

There’s something about messaging friends when you’ve all reached the same chapter, or trying to guess what’s going to happen next, that reminds me reading was always supposed to be something to enjoy.

Not another thing to achieve.

I do still have a reading goal each year. But it has very little to do with the number itself. It’s more of a reminder of the kind of life I’m trying to build

One where I spend less time mindlessly reaching for my phone and a little more time doing things that actually leave me feeling nourished afterwards.

Because that’s probably the biggest thing reading has given me.

Not more knowledge.

Not another way to improve myself.

Just the experience of disappearing into something because I love it.

Following curiosity instead of obligation.

Choosing something because it fills me up, not because it has an obvious return on investment.

Books don’t always need to teach me something.

They don’t need to make me smarter.

They don’t need to change my life.

Sometimes they just remind me what it feels like to become completely absorbed in something that brings me joy.

And lately, I think that’s been its own kind of healing.

Ordinarily, I probably would have nodded along and moved on.

But something about it stayed with me because I found myself wondering what we even mean when we say it.

How do you know when you’ve realized your potential?

How do you know when you’ve reached it?

Because the more I sat with the question, the more impossible it seemed to answer.

There is always another skill to learn.

Another book to read.

Another area of your life you could improve.

Another habit to develop.

Another opportunity you could pursue.

Another version of yourself waiting somewhere in the future.

Another way you could become a better parent, partner, friend, business owner, leader, or human being.

Potential, by its very nature, is infinite.

There is always more of it.

You can build a successful career and still have more potential.

You can be making great money and still be nowhere near what’s possible for you to generate.

You can write the book, launch the business, move to the city, buy the house, heal the wound, learn the lesson and there will still be more potential left.

The horizon keeps moving.

And I think that’s why the idea has been rattling around in my head ever since.

Because while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being growth-oriented, the older I get, the clearer it’s become that, for people like me, the pursuit of potential isn’t always as innocent as it sounds.

And by people like me, I mean the women who are already doing a lot.

The ones who are already reading the books, listening to the podcasts, thinking ahead and centering our lives (often to our detriment) around the notion that we should always be striving to a future, better version of ourselves.

Because that’s the thing we don’t often talk about.

When your identity becomes centered around reaching your potential, then everything else gets evaluated through that lens.

Is this making me better?

Is this moving me forward?

Is this productive?

Is it helping me grow?

And suddenly, doing things for the pure sake of it quickly feels like waste (even if we wouldn’t admit it) because it’s not something advancing us in some way.

And if you’re someone whose nervous system already struggles to trust sufficiency, that becomes a problem.

Because potential gives you a reason to never arrive.

There’s always another thing you could be doing that makes where you are not enough.

I think it all bumps up against the same question I’ve been circling for months now. And it’s:

What if life isn’t a project?

What if it isn’t something to optimize or maximize?

What if it isn’t even something to fully realize, but rather something to inhabit?

Can this moment be enough on its own?

I spent years on the endless treadmill of becoming, but now what feels most regenerative is allowing life to expand through presence rather than constantly chasing more.

Because yes, potential is infinite, but a life is finite.

And I think that’s why I’ve resonated with Burkeman’s writing so much.

He argues that the goal was never to become limitless. It was to make peace with being finite. Because once you stop treating your limitations as a problem to overcome, you’re free to give yourself more fully to the life that’s actually here.

His work keeps returning to the idea that our limitations aren’t an obstacle standing between us and a meaningful life. They’re what make a meaningful life possible.

The fact that we can’t do everything means we have to choose. And it’s those choices—the things we commit to, the things we let go of—that give a life its shape.

So I find myself asking not whether I’m realizing all of my potential in any given moment, but if I’m fully participating in my actual life.

Because while they sound similar, they’re radically different.

One keeps moving the finish line, the other invites you into the life you’re already standing in.

One makes you treat yourself like an untapped resource, the other allows you to start treating yourself like a person.

To be clear, I don’t think growth is the problem.

Some of the most transformative experiences of my life have come from learning, stretching myself, and stepping into things that once felt impossible.

Growing up, my mom always told us that no one could take our education away. Learning wasn’t just encouraged; it was seen as a pathway to freedom.

And there are absolutely moments in life when change becomes necessary. When your circumstances no longer fit. When staying where you are would require abandoning yourself.

This isn’t an argument against ambition, growth, or becoming.

What I’ve been questioning is the energy underneath it.

What is driving the pursuit?

Is it curiosity? Expression? Expansion or a genuine desire to see what’s possible?

Or is it self-correction?

Is there some part of me that still believes life will finally begin once I become someone else?

Because when I look back, I can see how much of my relationship with the future was shaped by my childhood.

Growing up around financial instability, the future wasn’t just something to look forward to. It was somewhere to escape to. A place where everything would finally be okay. A place where I would be safe.

And in many ways, that orientation served me. It gave me direction, hope and a drive to take action.

But I’ve started to wonder what happens when the circumstances change and the strategy stays the same.

Because I see this pattern everywhere in entrepreneurs, high achievers and industry leaders. The drive often begins as a response to something real. Childhood lack. A wound. A longing to create a different life.

The irony, though, is that many of them succeed. They build the career or the business. They make the money and the life they once dreamed about. And yet the striving remains.

The horizon keeps moving. Not because they haven’t arrived, but because the part of them doing the chasing never learned that they already had.

That’s the question I’ve been sitting with lately.

How much of our obsession with potential comes from a genuine desire to grow?

And how much of it comes from an old survival strategy that no longer realizes the emergency is over?

I also think capitalism benefits enormously from future fixation.

Because a person who believes that they are enough now is much harder to sell things to than a person who believes they’ll be enough later.

The latter buys the wellness hacks, the courses, the productivity systems, programs and anything else promising some future transformation.

And I think it’s because we’ve confused contentment with complacency.

As though being grateful for your life somehow means you’re lazy and unmotivated.

But the older I get, the less true that feels.

I can want things and still appreciate what’s here.

I can have ambitions without treating my current life as a waiting room.

I can work towards a future without constantly living in it.

I can stop saying that things will feel better when XYZ and allow myself to know that I can feel happy now while still creating.

I’m still very much in process with all of this but the thing that’s emerging is that I’m no longer trying to manifest a bigger and better life. I’m trying to manifest a richer one.

Deeper community, richer relationships, more beauty and experiences, and a more authentic sense of self…

Meaning, belonging, savoring… being in relationship with life.

None of those require me to realize all of my potential.

They simply require me to experience more of my life.

Leave a comment

There are spirit weeks and field days, random school closures and half-days, long weekends and permission slips, and all the little moving pieces that somehow seem to descend all at once around this time of year.

We had Memorial Day on Monday, my kids were off school again yesterday, field day is tomorrow, the school’s closed again next week, and there’s just a lot happening all at the same time.

But interestingly, I haven’t been overwhelmed by it in the way I once would have been.

And I think part of that is just the gift of being a parent to older children now.

My eldest is almost seven, and there’s something really grounding about reaching the stage where family life has rhythms to it.

When your kids are little, everything feels constantly in flux. You finally find your footing and then suddenly naps change, or sleep or feeding changes, or somebody gets sick and the whole system falls apart again.

Now it feels different.

Full, yes. Busy, definitely. But… familiar.

We know the rhythm of our life now.

And I think that familiarity has softened something in me, too.

Over Memorial Day weekend we had really heavy rain here in New York and our basement flooded again. Honestly, at this point it’s basically become a neighborhood rite of passage whenever there’s a major storm. Everyone’s basements flood.

A few years ago, something like that would have completely dysregulated me. I would’ve spiraled into immediate fix-it mode, spending the entire weekend trying to restore order as quickly as possible. And all because I had such a low tolerance for things feeling unresolved, unfinished or out of control.

But this time I just… didn’t.

We had people set to come during the week to sort it out, so I let the laundry pile up upstairs, closed the basement door and carried on with the weekend.

A few days later, I went out with one of my closest girlfriends and we spent the entire afternoon together. We wandered around Atlantic Avenue, popped in and out of little shops, retreated from the rain for snacks, eventually had dinner, talked for hours and hugged goodbye standing on the subway platform like we were teenagers.

I think one of the things I’m realizing more and more in this season of life is how much we need our people.

I spent so much of my twenties feeling like I couldn’t really rely on anyone else in a meaningful way simply because I had become so used to being the holder.

And when you get used to being that person, receiving support can almost start to feel more uncomfortable than carrying everything yourself.

Now, I think the opposite is true.

I think life becomes infinitely more sustainable when we allow ourselves to be supported by people we trust. By friendships. By community. By conversations where we can exhale a little and also, step into the version of ourselves outside of the roles we play.

And something happened during that date that felt strangely symbolic of a bigger shift I’ve been going through recently.

We originally sat down at a restaurant that looked beautiful aesthetically, but the second we sat there, both of us knew it wasn’t actually where we wanted to be.

The atmosphere felt off, the service was strange, the whole thing just felt a little forced.

And I could feel this very old version of myself starting to kick in. The version that would’ve stayed anyway because leaving would feel awkward. The version that would override her own discomfort to avoid inconveniencing somebody else or seeming ‘difficult’.

But instead, I just told the truth.

I said, “I actually don’t think either of us wants to be here.”

And the second I said it, she was relieved and agreed.

So we left.

We went somewhere else we loved (the place we’d planned for that ended up being closed earlier in the day) and spent the next few hours sitting in a corner looking out at the rest of the restaurant, eating incredible food, drinking wine and talking about life.

And honestly, I think that moment stayed with me because it felt representative of something much bigger that has been shifting in me lately.

I’m becoming far less willing to override myself in small ways just to maintain ‘the peace’.

You know, the moments where something doesn’t feel right, but you convince yourself it’s fine.

The moments where your body is a full no, but you override it because you don’t want to inconvenience someone or disrupt the flow.

The moments where you know you’re at capacity, but you tell yourself you ‘should’ be able to manage it because technically, maybe, if you really pushed, you probably could.

And I think that’s the part I’ve been paying attention to lately.

The subtle ways we abandon what we actually know in order to keep everything moving smoothly.

Because when you are used to being the person who can hold a lot, there can be this unconscious expectation that you should always be able to find more capacity somewhere.

And I think what I’m learning, slowly and repeatedly, is that there is so much peace in admitting the truth earlier.

The truth might be: I don’t actually want to sit in this restaurant.

I don’t have the capacity to deal with the basement right now…

Or: the laundry can wait.

Or: this season is full and I cannot do all of the things I usually expect myself to do.

Or: I am not okay in the way I keep trying to convince myself I am.

That last one is obviously much bigger, and it’s where I’m going with today’s post, but I think all of these things live on the same spectrum.

This default so many of us have to override our reality.

To convince ourselves that with enough effort, enough organisation, enough planning and optimizing, we should be able to keep everything together.

Oliver Burkeman talks about this in his book, Meditations for Mortals, which I happened to pick up from the library last week.

One of the things he says very plainly is that there will literally never be enough time to do all the things you want to do in your lifetime, let alone all the things on your to-do list this week.

And while I know that intellectually, I needed to hear that again.

Because I think so much of my life has been organised around the unconscious belief that the answer was to become better at carrying things.

Better systems.

Better routines.

Better time management.

Better emotional regulation.

Better optimization.

Not necessarily reducing the burden itself, but becoming more efficient at holding it.

Sometimes, the kinder thing to do, he says, is actually to let the burden become so heavy that we finally put it (and that underlying belief) down.

And that really hit me.

Because maybe the freedom doesn’t come from finally becoming the kind of woman who can carry everything.

Maybe freedom comes from telling the truth about what you actually have capacity for.

And while that’s true, it’s a lot to internalize because it means acknowledging that means admitting that some things will be undone, or imperfect or have to wait. And that sometimes people may be disappointed and expectations may need to be lowered. And your life may not look quite as polished or together as the version you were trying so hard to maintain.

But you also get to breathe.

You get to stop spending so much energy denying the reality of your own limitations, and instead, come to terms with what you can (and want to) hold.

And honestly, I think that realization is connected to what I really want to talk about in today’s post.

A few years ago, I started noticing that something felt off in my body.

It started with my cycle.

In my twenties, and even my early thirties, I could move through my luteal phase pretty much unscathed. I might feel a little more sensitive or tired, but it wasn’t something that felt like it completely took over.

And then, all of a sudden, my luteal phase became loud.

I started feeling emotionally volatile in a way that I couldn’t just manage by regulating harder, and there was this underlying sense that something in my body had shifted.

So when I went for my annual appointment with my gynaecologist, I brought it up.

I remember saying to her, “I don’t feel like my normal self. I’m not saying something is terribly wrong, I just know that this isn’t about me being a busy mom. Something feels off, especially during my luteal phase, and I’m struggling.”

Long story short, she diagnosed me with PMDD, which is premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and suggested I consider going on an SSRI, which stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

I remember feeling taken aback.

My immediate response was, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s not that bad.”

Looking back now, I can see how much of that reaction was tied to my own misunderstanding of what SSRIs even are.

I had always heard them spoken about as antidepressants, and in my mind, antidepressants were for people who were severely depressed or unable to function without medical support. I didn’t realise that SSRIs could be used for anxiety, and I definitely didn’t identify as someone who needed medication.

That was the part I couldn’t quite reconcile at first.

It felt like what she was saying to me was completely at odds with how I saw myself.

Because I was functioning.

I was running a business.

I was mothering.

I was getting things done.

I was the person who had the plan, read the book, found the routine, figured things out, kept the house moving, remembered everything, held everything and somehow, even if I was completely exhausted underneath it all, still appeared to be coping.

So when she suggested medication, something in me immediately went, “no, no, you’ve misunderstood. I’m not struggling in that way. I just need to get this under control.”

And honestly, that tells me so much now.

Because even then, my instinct was not to ask, “Do I need more support?”

My instinct was, “What system am I missing?”

I think a lot of women miss themselves because their struggle still looks functional from the outside. I’d genuinely love to know if that’s something you’ve experienced too.

Leave a comment

So I left that appointment convinced I just needed to take the supplements she recommended, clean up my routine even more, figure out what was happening hormonally and get myself back on track.

And honestly, it’s almost laughable now because discipline has never been my issue.

I know how to organise, plan, be consistent, research and execute.

What I didn’t know how to do was acknowledge that the load itself had become too much to carry.

And there was a lot happening at the time.

I was making really big decisions in my business and completely transforming my business model. Things were picking up for Michael at work, which meant more of the home load was falling to me. We had multiple losses in the family. I was grieving, he was grieving, and we had to move home during that same period.

And my kids were also shifting out of that baby stage into being these little people with more complex emotions, bigger personalities, bigger needs, bigger sibling dynamics to manage, and a much greater requirement for me to be emotionally present in a way that I don’t think I had fully anticipated.

So I wasn’t just physically tired. I was carrying a lot emotionally.

And yet my instinct was still: how do I get better at managing this?

It never occurred to me that this might not be a “me” issue.

That distinction feels really important to me now because when I think about so many of the women in my life, so many of us were taught to interpret overwhelm as a personal flaw.

If we’re struggling, we assume we need to get better.

We rarely stop to ask whether what we’re carrying is actually reasonable.

And I think that’s especially true when you’ve spent your whole life being the capable one.

Because when you’re used to being that person, every challenge becomes another thing to figure out and persevere through. You get really good at struggling quietly and finding something (or someone) to fix. You get really good at locating the problem inside yourself because that gives you something to work on, and working on something feels safer than admitting that the structure of your life may be asking too much of you.

Around that time, I remember talking to my therapist about how dysregulated I felt by my children’s emotions. Their meltdowns, their needs, the emotional outbursts, and the constant emotional demands of motherhood.

And she said to me, “You do realise you were a deeply feeling child, too?”

When I first heard her say that, I didn’t really relate to it because I had always seen myself as someone who was pretty even-keeled and not particularly emotional. If anything, I would have described myself as the opposite.

But she said, “No, you are deeply feeling. The only difference is that you became mature as a child because you had to.”

And she was right.

In that moment, so much of my life made sense.

I could see that I had spent years regulating myself through control.

Looking back, when I felt emotionally unsafe as a child, I would do things like clean my room or organise something. I would control whatever I could control because there wasn’t really space for me to be messy, or have an emotional outburst.

I could see that the adults around me were navigating a lot, so the way I felt like I could help was by taking up the least amount of space possible.

And that pattern clearly followed me into adulthood.

The more overwhelmed I felt internally, the more I tightened externally, busied myself, took on more and wanted to make everything around me feel neat, polished and under control.

And eventually my body stopped cooperating with that strategy.

I started having heart palpitations, I became extremely sensitive to light almost overnight, I couldn’t sleep properly, and it felt like my body was sounding an alarm that I could no longer ignore.

I remember one night lying in bed feeling absolutely exhausted and simultaneously unable to relax. My body was tired and I desperately needed rest, but I couldn’t get my mind to stop racing.

And I realize now that bedtime was probably the first moment my body had to actually metabolize the day.

I had spent every waking hour doing something, holding something, thinking about someone, anticipating what needed to happen next, managing work, managing home, managing children, managing my own emotions so I could manage everyone else’s, and then I would get into bed and my body would finally have a second to process what it had been carrying all day.

Eventually I told Michael, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

He had to stay home with the kids, so I called one of my closest friends.

Even calling her felt significant because an older version of me would have tried to handle it alone. I would have told myself, I’m a big girl, I can do this, it doesn’t make sense to make her leave her house in the middle of the night to sit with me in A&E, we’re probably going to be there for hours, we may not even get answers, it could be nothing, I don’t want to waste her time.

But she came immediately, without question.

We were sitting in A&E and it was freezing because they had the AC on full blast, but I was sweating, heart racing, and just felt completely out of my body.

At that moment, she got up and advocated for me.

She went to the front desk and said something along the lines of, “It is freezing here yet she is dripping in sweat. She needs to be seen.”

And they listened.

I ended up being seen faster, and even now, that moment makes me emotional because it was such a powerful thing to have someone else hold me for once.

To have someone else be the one advocating.

To be allowed to be in my feelings and not be the one managing the room or feeling bad for making someone worry about me.

Long story short, they ran all of the tests and physically, I was healthy.

But what I was experiencing was chronic anxiety.

In one of my follow-up appointments, as we were going through all the results, my doctor said to me, “I get the sense that you’ve probably been living with anxiety for much of your life and these recent stressors just became a catalyst for all the physical symptoms.”

And that was another pivotal moment.

Because suddenly everything connected.

The hyper-vigilance made sense. The constant need to be ten steps ahead made sense. The way I was always scanning for what might go wrong. The way I struggled to rest and had been living with this low-grade sense of bracing for as long as I could remember suddenly had language.

It wasn’t that anxiety had appeared out of nowhere. It was that the conditions of my life had made something that had always been there impossible to ignore.

Being halfway across the world from family, with two young kids, making huge decisions in my business, experiencing loss, moving home, carrying so much more than I was admitting — it all came to a crescendo.

And eventually, I agreed to try an SSRI because I was desperate to feel different.

I had reached the point where I could no longer optimize my way out of what I was experiencing, and I finally had to admit that I needed support.

This is the part where the conversation gets deeper.

In the rest of this piece, I’m sharing:

• what happened after I finally went on an SSRI,

• the identity unraveling that came with it,

• what I realised about overfunctioning, anxiety and support,

• and why I think so many high-functioning women are quietly reaching nervous system capacity.

If this kind of writing resonates with you, paid subscriptions support my work and give you full access to every weekly essay and archive piece.

Read more

I turned 36 in March, and I think for the first time in my life, I could actually feel myself getting older.

Not in some dramatic, existential crisis kind of way. In quieter ways.

The way my body now requires more care and intentionality than it did in my twenties. The way one glass of wine can affect me the next day. The way energy is no longer something I can endlessly override without consequence.

In my twenties, I barely thought about my body unless it was aesthetic. I could sleep badly, work constantly, drink too much, eat whatever, ignore my nervous system completely and still somehow bounce back.

Now I feel everything.

And strangely, I don’t say that with resentment. If anything, I think what unsettled me was simply realising that I had crossed into a different phase of life. One where my body was asking for partnership instead of extraction.

And I think that birthday cracked open something bigger for me around ageing in general.

Because what I’m realising is that one of the paradoxes of getting older is that while you become more rooted in yourself, life also becomes less hypothetical.

When you’re younger, life feels very future-facing. There’s still this feeling that everything could change at any moment. There are so many possible versions of your life still available to you.

And yes, that uncertainty can feel terrifying when you’re in it. You don’t know if you’ll meet your person. You don’t know what your career will become. You don’t know where you’ll live or whether things will work out.

But there’s also something expansive about it.

You haven’t yet made enough choices for your life to fully solidify around them.

Now, in my late thirties, so much of my life is no longer theoretical.

I am married.

I am a mother.

I have built a career and a business.

I do live the life I spent so much of my twenties trying to create.

And there’s something deeply grounding about that.

You genuinely could not pay me to go back to the uncertainty and insecurity of my twenties. I don’t miss constantly questioning myself. I don’t miss all the shape-shifting. And I don’t miss feeling untethered from myself.

But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t also something disorienting about realising that life is now less about becoming and more about living.

Because choosing anything means no longer choosing everything else.

And I don’t think we talk enough about the existential transition that happens when you move from building your life… to emotionally inhabiting the life you built.

Growing up, there was a very clear script around me.

You go to university.

You meet your future husband.

You get the job.

You save for the house.

You get married.

You have children.

And of course, those things can absolutely be beautiful. Many of them were things I genuinely wanted.

But I can also see now how much urgency I attached to them.

I remember being in my mid-twenties and constantly going to weddings, baby showers, christenings and first birthdays.

Most of my friendship group was slightly older than me, so it felt like everyone around me was hitting these milestones while I was somehow behind.

Professionally, I was actually doing really well. I had a great career. I’d landed a senior role as a fashion editor very young. But emotionally, I still felt like I hadn’t “made it” yet because I hadn’t achieved the life milestones I thought I was supposed to have by then.

And because I grew up with a single mom, I think there was also a very deep desire in me to create the kind of stability and family structure I hadn’t experienced growing up.

Not because my childhood lacked love — it absolutely didn’t. My mum raised three girls on her own and did an incredible job. But there was financial instability, and there was struggle, and I think a huge amount of my twenties was unconsciously shaped by wanting to outrun that.

I desperately wanted to create the picture-perfect version of stability.

The husband.

The children.

The home.

The feeling that I had finally “arrived.”

And what’s strange is that culturally, that’s often where the conversation stops.

You spend your twenties striving towards these milestones, but very few people actually talk honestly about what happens after you achieve them.

What happens when you finally get the things you spent years working towards?

What happens when your life becomes more settled, but you simultaneously realise that certain doors are naturally closing too?

Not in a catastrophic way. Just in the very normal way that adulthood works.

There are paths I could have taken at 25 that simply wouldn’t make sense for me now.

There are versions of life that are no longer available because I chose this one.

And again, I don’t say that from regret. I think that’s what feels so difficult to articulate sometimes. I don’t want a different life. I love my life deeply.

But I do think there’s a quiet grief that comes with realising you cannot live every version of yourself.

And I think many of us experience this in our thirties and forties without having much language for it.

Because once you’ve achieved the milestones, there’s this unspoken question underneath everything:

Okay… and now what?

Not because life is empty.

But because for the first time, nobody is handing you the next script.

You have to decide what matters to you outside of the milestones.

And I think that’s why so many women around this age start having existential reckonings.

Because we are finally having enough lived experience to question whether some of the things we were chasing were actually ours… or whether they were inherited ideas of what a successful life was supposed to look like.

And honestly, I also think part of the reason this stage of life can feel so disorienting is because we don’t actually hear that many honest conversations about it.

I don’t remember growing up hearing women openly talk about the emotional reality of life after the milestones. I don’t remember reading books about this season of womanhood. And maybe part of that is that when you’re younger, you’re so focused on becoming that you don’t yet have the context to be interested in what comes after.

But I also think culturally we tend to fetishise youth and undervalue the voices and experiences of women after a certain age.

You see it in everything.

The way we barely speak about perimenopause even though women have experienced it forever. The way every generation of women seems to arrive there blindsided because nobody prepared them for what was coming. The way we centre women most when they are young, desirable, becoming.

And now, ironically, I find myself craving the wisdom of older women more than ever.

I want to hear from women in their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond. I want to know how they navigated identity shifts, marriage, motherhood, reinvention, grief, ageing, friendship, ambition, all of it.

I find myself consciously reading books from women in different generations now because I realize how much perspective exists outside of the echo chamber of your peers and your immediate life stage.

Honestly, one of my favourite things now is spending time with my mum and her friends and listening to them talk about life.

There’s something deeply grounding about being around women who have already lived through multiple versions of themselves.

And I think part of getting older is realising how little any of us actually knew at 25.

I say that with so much tenderness towards my younger self because she was doing the best she could with the awareness she had.

But there’s so much I simply didn’t have the context to understand yet.

And one of the biggest shifts for me has been my relationship with my mum.

We’ve become even closer over the past few years, and I think part of that is because for the first time, I’m relating to her not just as my mother, but as her own person.

As a woman.

As someone who also had dreams and fears and disappointments and identity shifts and seasons of reinvention.

I find myself constantly asking her questions now.

“How did you feel during that period of your life?”

“What made you make that decision?”

“What was motherhood like for you then?”

“Did you struggle with this too?”

And what’s been humbling is realizing how much more I understand her now than I did in my twenties.

There were sacrifices she made for our family that younger me judged her for because I simply did not yet have the context to understand them.

I was very much from the generation of “you can have it all.” I genuinely thought women should be able to perfectly optimize motherhood, marriage, career, ambition, selfhood — all simultaneously.

Now, as a mother myself, I understand the cost of everything so much more deeply.

I understand what capacity means.

I understand emotional labour.

I understand the exhaustion of being needed constantly.

I understand why some women choose home and family over striving at certain stages of life.

And honestly, the longer I’m a mother and the more responsibilities I carry, the more I realize how much I need nurturing too.

It’s funny because in my twenties, I was so attached to being independent. I wanted to prove that I didn’t need anyone. I thought strength looked like hyper-independence.

Now, I feel almost the opposite.

The more years I spend mothering, managing a home, navigating marriage, friendships, work and the emotional weight of adulthood, the more I realize how much I need support, softness, guidance and care too.

I need my mom.

I need my girlfriends.

I need my therapist.

I need community.

If this feels like a conversation you’ve been needing too, the rest of the piece is waiting for you below.

Read more

At the end of June, the kids finish school and we fly back to London. For anyone newer here, even though I live in Brooklyn with my husband and our two kids, I’m actually London-born and raised, so every year we go home for a big chunk of the summer holidays.

Michael comes for the first couple of weeks, we celebrate my eldest’s birthday there, and then he flies back to New York for work while I stay in London with the kids for another month or so.

This year feels particularly special because my mum turned 70 earlier this year. We weren’t able to fly to London to celebrate at the time, so while we’re there this summer, we’re doing a proper family celebration and then all flying to Greece together for a week.

And honestly, a lot of my headspace lately has been around how I want this summer to feel, not just logistically, but energetically.

I’ve been thinking about previous summers and what worked, what didn’t, what allowed me to feel really present and what left me feeling split between my life and work. One thing I’ve realized is that what feels hardest for me now isn’t necessarily working itself, it’s carrying ongoing operational or marketing pressure in the background while I’m trying to unwind and be present.

So over the past few weeks, I’ve been intentionally doing a little bit extra ahead of time and slowly getting things scheduled, organized and streamlined so that when we land in London, I’m not constantly context-switching.

And even that sentence probably says a lot about how much my relationship with ambition has changed over the past few years.

There was a version of me who would have created the conditions to feel busy and then worn that busyness as proof that I was doing something right. I genuinely felt most alive when I was building towards something, chasing something, fixing something, growing something, and for a very long time, I thought that was just who I was.

But over the past few years, especially since becoming a mother, I’ve realised that a lot of what I thought was ambition was actually overfunctioning.

I don’t say that with shame. In many ways, overfunctioning got me here.

I was raised by an incredibly strong mother who was doing it on her own. She raised three girls by herself, and while there was so much love in my childhood, there was also financial instability and inconsistency.

One of the things she always instilled in us was the importance of education, independence and making your own money. She used to say that nobody could take your education away from you, and that having your own money gives you choices, options and power.

I’m deeply grateful for that. Those values shaped so much of my courage, my ambition, my willingness to bet on myself and my belief that I could create a different life.

But I can also see now that I took those lessons and absorbed something much deeper through my nervous system, which was that safety came from being completely self-sufficient. That if I could just be capable enough, prepared enough, educated enough, successful enough, then maybe I’d never have to feel at the mercy of instability again.

I wanted to be the child who made everyone proud. The one who showed that my mum had done a good job because ‘look at how I turned out’. I wanted to be the one who got the grades, did the right thing, made the sensible choice, stayed out of trouble and somehow created order around me by being as perfect as I possibly could be.

And I don’t think I had language for this at the time, but I can see now that very early on, I started believing that the way to avoid chaos was to control myself.

If I could dot every i and cross every t, if I could be diligent and responsible and mature and prepared, then maybe life couldn’t catch me off guard. Maybe when I was an adult, I could finally control the circumstances around me enough to feel safe.

That is such a tender thing to admit now because of course life doesn’t work that way. You can have the money, the business, the relationship, the home, the beautiful life, and still not be able to protect yourself from grief or uncertainty or pain or the normal human experience of things not always going to plan.

But I didn’t know that then.

So naturally, that wiring followed me into adulthood.

Two weeks after graduating university, I landed a job as a fashion editor at a newspaper. I was the youngest person to hold a senior role on a publication like that, and of course at the time it felt like proof that all of the striving had worked. I was young, ambitious, moving quickly, and honestly, I loved that version of my life.

I still have so much respect for that version of me.

She was courageous. She gave up a career in fashion at the height of it to start out on her own. She moved to New York, set up meetings, made connections, figured things out, believed in her dreams and made things happen. I don’t regret being her. I needed to be her to become me.

But when I eventually started my business, I carried that same energy with me, except entrepreneurship gave it a much bigger playground.

Looking back, I can see why entrepreneurship attracts people like me. There is always something to fix, optimize, launch, improve, grow, refine, sell, rethink or make better. There is always a new milestone, a new room, a new strategy, a new level, a new problem to solve. And when your nervous system has already learned that movement equals safety, that can feel incredibly validating.

It didn’t feel like over-functioning at the time. It felt like being driven. It felt like being responsible. It felt like making the most of my potential.

And because the business was growing, because clients were coming, because opportunities were opening, because all of this effort was producing things that looked and felt like progress, it kept reinforcing the belief that this was working.

That is the complicated thing about over-functioning. When someone is under-functioning, it is often easier to identify because the consequences are visible. But when someone is over-functioning, especially a woman, especially someone who has been rewarded her whole life for being capable and productive and good at holding everything together, the consequences can be much harder to name.

Subscribe now

People admire it.

They call you disciplined, ambitious, motivated… impressive.

And for a long time, I thought that was just my authentic self.

I didn’t understand that I was getting so much of my worth from being the person who could carry, anticipate, soothe, fix, produce and keep things moving.

I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal to feel so responsible for everything. In fact, I would gaslight myself for feeling drained because a part of me genuinely believed everyone should be this way.

“Like, isn’t this what being responsible looks like?”

“Isn’t this what being ambitious looks like? Isn’t this how you build a good life?”

It was only through therapy that I started to understand over-functioning as a pattern. And even then, it took me a while to really absorb it because I kept coming back to the same thought: but these patterns got me here.

They helped me build the business. They helped me create financial stability. They helped me make bold decisions and become someone who could figure things out.

And that is where the grief comes in, because once you start seeing how much of your life has been shaped by a lens you didn’t know you were looking through, you start asking yourself questions that are hard to answer.

Was that desire authentic, or was it an adaptation?

Did I really want that thing, or did I want what I thought it would protect me from?

Was I making choices from desire, or was I making choices in response to what I had seen and survived?

There is a lot of grief in that.

I think one of the biggest things I’ve realized is that I was so afraid of ‘settling’ that I never allowed myself to feel settled.

That has been sitting with me because it explains so much.

For so long, settling felt like the worst thing I could possibly do. I didn’t want to live a small life. I didn’t want to waste my potential. I didn’t want to become complacent. I didn’t want to look back and feel like I hadn’t made the most of what I was capable of.

But because I had made settling the enemy, I couldn’t recognize contentment when it arrived.

In my mind, feeling settled and settling had become tangled together.

So every milestone became temporary. I would put something on a pedestal and tell myself that once I reached it, then I would feel a certain way. Once I hit that income goal, once the business reached that stage, once I had that kind of stability, once I got to that next level, then maybe I would feel settled.

But the second I reached it, my brain moved the goalpost.

It wasn’t enough.

What’s next?

What should I be aiming for now?

How do I make sure I don’t lose momentum?

How do I keep growing?

It only felt like I was doing the right thing if I was moving. If I was fixing a problem, chasing a goal, solving the next challenge, finding something messy to fiddle with or pushing through something difficult. That was where satisfaction lived for me. Not in peace, but in effort.

And the entrepreneurial spaces I was in only intensified that.

There were always conversations about bigger numbers, bigger launches, bigger leaps, bigger rooms. And I understand why that messaging appealed to me now because it tapped directly into my wiring. It validated the part of me that believed ease was dangerous and that wanting more was what kept me moving.

I remember being in manifestation circles where people would ask, “what are you calling in next? What are you manifesting? What do you want more of?” And sometimes I would go completely blank because I didn’t know.

Instead of interpreting that as contentment, I thought it meant something was wrong with me.

Maybe I had a block.

Maybe I wasn’t dreaming big enough.

Maybe I was getting complacent.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that maybe I was allowed to want the life I already had.

And I think that’s such a big part of this conversation because there is so much around us that depends on us staying dissatisfied. Wanting more keeps us consuming. It keeps us striving and feeling like our current life is just the starting point for some better, shinier version.

And of course there is nothing wrong with desire. There are times when I do feel inspired to grow, create and build something new. I’m not anti-ambition or anti-money; nor am I anti-growth. But I had to be really honest with myself about whether my wanting was coming from aliveness or from fear.

Because for a long time, dissatisfaction was the thing that created movement for me.

If I was dissatisfied, I would act, I would fix, I would prove. I would push.

So when I started feeling genuinely content in my life, there was this strange internal panic of, but will I still be driven if I’m happy? If I allow myself to feel satisfied, will I stop growing? If I let this be enough, am I settling?

And that was one of the most confronting parts of the whole transition.

Because when I really let myself ask what would actually make me happy, the answer wasn’t some huge, dramatic vision.

It was the life I was already living, with more space to actually experience it.

It was slow mornings. Time to move my body in ways that felt good.

Time to do my spiritual practices.

Time to read, write, be outside, tend to my garden, make a meaningful contribution through my work and still have enough energy left to pick my kids up from school and spend the afternoon with them.

It was making dinner in a calm way, not because we had all just walked in at five o’clock and I was racing against the bedtime routine, but because there was spaciousness around the evening.

It was having enough money to fund the life we actually value, not the life I thought I had to keep proving I could afford.

And honestly, that simplicity was confronting too.

Because I knew it was a privileged thing to want.

I had resistance around that. I had watched my mother struggle. I had seen women, especially Black women, carry so much and have to be so strong for so long, and there was a part of me that felt like wanting softness, wanting spaciousness, wanting a sustainable pace, was indulgent.

But I’ve started to see it differently.

Maybe that is part of the blessing. Maybe things get to shift in my line starting with me. Maybe I am allowed to want softness. Maybe I am allowed to want a life where work is not the epicentre. Maybe I am allowed to build in a way where my family, my internal world and my self-nourishment are not the leftovers after everything else has been handled.

Motherhood brought all of this into sharper focus.

Before I had kids, I could pour so much of my energy into work because there wasn’t really anything competing for that bandwidth. My business could get the best of me. My ideas could get the best of me. I could spend hours thinking about strategy, clients, offers and what I wanted to build next, and genuinely, I loved that season.

Even when my children were babies, it still felt possible in some ways to hold both. They could kind of come along for the ride. I could nurse while working, fit things around naps and still maintain a level of intensity in the business.

But as they started becoming their own little people, what they needed from me changed.

It wasn’t just about the physical logistics anymore. It was the emotional energy. The co-regulation. The way children need you to be present enough to notice what is happening underneath the behavior. The way the emotional tone of the home often runs through you. The way parenting thoughtfully requires you to keep coming back to yourself while also holding these little people who are learning how to be in the world.

I don’t think you can really understand how much that requires until you’re in it.

And even if someone had told me, I don’t think I would have had the context to understand.

Motherhood is the most rewarding thing I have ever done, but it also requires more from me than anything else I have ever done. More than my business. More than my clients. More than any professional challenge I’ve ever had to meet.

And that changed my relationship with work.

Not because I stopped caring about it – I love my work deeply – but I realized that, for me, in this season, the most important work I’m doing is happening at home and inside myself.

I know not every parent feels that way, and I actually think feminism is about women having choices. There are women whose professional ambitions remain the central thing after children, and that is valid too. But for me, the work at home became the thing I could no longer organize around the edges.

It needed the centre.

And once I accepted that, my business had to change.

One of the clearest examples was after-school care.

My kids finish school at 2pm, and for a while they would go into after-care so I could have more time to work. But I started feeling really convicted that I wanted them home with me.

I wanted them to have slow afternoons with each other. I wanted to shepherd that sibling relationship and be present for this season while they are still little enough to want that from me.

On paper, that meant less time to work.

And at the same time, because of what I had been through with burnout and my nervous system, I also had to be honest about the fact that the hours when my kids are at school could no longer be treated as hours to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of.

I need solitude.

I need quiet.

I need time to move my body.

I need space to hear myself think.

I need time to pour back into myself so that I have the capacity to hold what my life requires of me right now.

So the math became very real.

Less time for work because my kids were coming home earlier.

Less time for work because some of my workday now needed to go towards tending to myself.

Less time for work because I could no longer build a business that depended on me overriding my own capacity.

And that meant my business needed to become stable, simple and leveraged enough to exist inside those constraints.

Not in a vague “life-first” way, but in a very practical way.

I work roughly between 10 and 1 most days. There is only so much I can do in that time. I cannot build a business that relies on trading endless hours for money. I cannot be in a million different moving pieces at once. I cannot say yes to growth that requires me to abandon the very life I’m trying to protect.

That clarity has actually made me more disciplined.

If the business grows, it has to grow inside these parameters. It has to support the life I’m choosing, not quietly consume it.

But I don’t want to pretend that making those decisions felt clean.

When I started restructuring my business around the life I actually wanted, my revenue started slowing down.

And that was terrifying.

For a long time, my revenue had been going up and up and up. So to make decisions that I knew in my body were right for me and my family, and then see those decisions result in a decline in revenue and take-home pay, touched the deepest part of my wiring.

I had spent so much of my life over-functioning because I was afraid of financial instability, and now here I was, watching the thing that had always made me feel safe begin to change.

And I did not immediately respond like some deeply regulated woman who trusted the process.

I rushed to fix it.

Of course I did.

You don’t go from being the fixer, the over-functioner, the person who has always made things happen, to suddenly being completely calm in the face of uncertainty. My nervous system went into overdrive. It was like my whole body was sounding the alarm: we are not safe, we are not safe, fix this now.

So I tried to fix it. I strategized. I overthought. I went back into the mode I knew so well.

But the fixing didn’t solve it in the way it used to.

And that brought me to my knees a little bit because fixing had always been reliable for me. It had always worked. If something felt uncertain, I could work harder, think harder, solve harder, and eventually I would feel in control again.

This time, I had to see that the very thing I was using to feel safe was also the thing keeping me in a state of hyper-vigilance.

The medicine was in the opposite.

It was in allowing myself to see the revenue dip and not immediately making that mean I was unsafe. It was in letting myself feel the fear without instantly turning it into a strategy. It was in riding the emotional wave first and making decisions after, rather than using action to avoid feeling the full weight of what was coming up.

And it was also in letting my marriage become more interdependent.

This is another part I don’t think I fully understood until I was in it.

Because of the way I grew up, and because of the way my mum raised us to be so independent, I carried this deep “I don’t need anyone” energy into adulthood. Even inside my marriage, even with a supportive husband, even with someone who has always contributed and shown up, I still carried this sense that the weight of our future financial success was on me.

Michael works a corporate job, so there is a structure to his work and a cap on what that looks like in a way that entrepreneurship doesn’t have. And because I was the entrepreneur, there was a part of me that felt like I had to be the one to make the big things possible. The bigger life. The extra support. The outsourcing. The cleaners, the childcare, the buying back of time, all the things the entrepreneurial books tell you successful people do.

So even though I was married, I was still operating like a woman who couldn’t fully let herself be supported.

And when my income dipped, I had to lean on him in a way I never really had before.

I had to let him support me.

I had to ask for more help.

I had to stop being the martyr.

I had to let him actually have the opportunity to play a support role instead of assuming I had to carry it all because “as a woman, no one is coming to save you.”

And honestly, that changed our marriage.

It brought us closer because it forced a level of partnership that my hyper-independence had not fully allowed before.

That was one of the gifts I didn’t expect.

The other thing I didn’t expect was the grief.

Because while all of this was happening, I was also feeling happier in my actual life than I had in years. That was the strange, disorienting part. Financially, things were not moving the way they used to. Professionally, my growth had slowed. Online, I wasn’t living inside the same kind of visible momentum. And yet offline, I felt more present. More connected. More like myself.

That contradiction was hard to hold.

There was grief in watching peers continue to grow in ways I knew I could have grown if I had made different choices.

There was grief in seeing other entrepreneurs I once felt aligned with surpass me while I was choosing stability, part-time hours and school pickup at 2pm.

There was grief in watching my husband’s corporate career continue advancing while my business was no longer on that same upward trajectory because I had chosen to prioritize something different.

And even though I wouldn’t change the decision, there was grief.

In the past, I would have tried to coach myself out of that feeling immediately. I would have told myself some cleaner story about how I chose this, so I shouldn’t feel sad about what I didn’t choose. But I don’t think that’s true anymore.

I can grieve paths I didn’t take and still deeply trust the one I did.

I can feel the sting of slower growth and still know that the life I’m building is the one I actually want.

I can be proud of peers who kept scaling and still feel tenderness around the fact that I stepped off that track.

That has been one of the biggest changes in me.

My nervous system can hold more now. I don’t have to run away from every emotion by turning it into a plan.

There was also grief around my identity.

Because I used to be the person who always had something exciting happening in the business. I used to be in the rooms. I used to pay tens of thousands of dollars to be around entrepreneurs talking about strategy, scale, growth and the next thing. And for a long time, I loved those spaces.

But slowly, I started noticing that those conversations didn’t land in my body the same way.

It wasn’t a dramatic “this is unaligned” moment. It was quieter than that. I would see certain conversations happening online, like the recent discourse around Emma Grede and her book, and people would be chiming in with all these entrepreneurial hot takes, and in the most loving way, I just had nothing to say.

Not because I’m ‘above’ it.

Because I genuinely didn’t care in the same way anymore.

That was confronting too because that used to be me. I used to be so entrenched in those conversations. I would have had so much to say. And suddenly I was more interested in gardening books and school pickup and what I wanted our evenings to feel like than weighing in on whatever the business internet was arguing about that week.

And then there was the marketing piece.

Because who wants to hire a business coach who is not constantly talking about quantum leaps?

That was a real fear.

For years, part of what made me marketable was that people could see the momentum. They could get on the train of my growth. There was always another milestone, another expansion, another “look what’s possible.”

But the truth was, I wasn’t interested in quantum leaping anymore.

I didn’t want massive income jumps for the sake of it.

I didn’t want to build a business around constantly chasing the next big milestone.

I wanted to make enough money to support the life we actually valued.

I wanted profit, stability, simplicity, meaningful work and time.

I wanted to help women make more money, yes, but I also wanted to help them navigate all of the things I had been navigating around ambition, capacity, over-functioning, nervous system safety and what success actually costs.

And I didn’t know how to market that at first.

It felt so much less sexy than “grow your business.”

But what has surprised me is that the more honest I have been, the more aligned the people who have found me are. There are more women like me than I realised. Women who care about business and money and meaningful work, but are also asking deeper questions about what they are building, what it costs, what their body can hold, what their families need, and whether the version of success they once wanted still feels true.

That has been one of the most beautiful parts of this whole transition.

I thought changing my relationship with ambition might make me less compelling.

Instead, it has made my work feel more honest.

And I think that’s what I would say to the woman who can feel her ambition changing and is terrified that it means she is becoming less impressive, less valuable or less herself.

I actually think it’s the opposite.

Maybe to some people, you will look less impressive.

Maybe to people who only understand success through speed, scale and visibility, your choices will not make sense.

But that doesn’t mean you are becoming less of yourself.

It may mean you are becoming more of yourself than you have ever allowed yourself to be.

Because you cannot make meaningful changes in your life if you are too afraid to be honest with yourself. If you keep clawing at all the breadcrumbs that make your current life feel “good enough” while some deeper part of you knows something is off, you will keep yourself tethered to a version of success that may no longer fit.

And I get why that is scary.

Being honest does not mean you have to blow up your life overnight. It does not mean you need to make immediate decisions. Sometimes the first step is simply allowing yourself to tell the truth internally without rushing to fix it.

That has become non-negotiable for me now.

I will not lie to myself just because the truth is inconvenient.

And what I know now is that ambition has not left me. It has just changed fuel sources.

Before, ambition felt like control. Like safety. Like proving. Like if I could just build enough, earn enough, achieve enough, then maybe I could finally rest.

Now ambition feels much more like satisfaction.

Like wanting to birth things, create things, move towards things because they feel exciting and regenerative, not because something is missing.

And I don’t miss the old version of me, not because she was bad, but because she is still in me.

I had to be her to become me.

I am so grateful for her courage, her grit, her willingness to dream and move and build. I couldn’t be in this happier, more regulated, more honest version of my life without everything she grew through.

But I am also grateful that I no longer need to keep living as though peace is something I have to earn later.

For the first time in my life, I’m not building around the hope that one day I’ll finally feel safe enough to rest.

I’m building a life I actually have the capacity to be present for.

Leave a comment

The four of us have been in the garden most afternoons, getting the beds ready and planting our spring crops.

We’ve got tomatoes and peppers growing indoors that we’re very excited about, although apparently we have to wait until after Mother’s Day to put them out when the soil will hopefully be warm enough, which feels like a long wait when you’ve got two kids asking about them every five minutes.

It’s been such a simple thing, but also one of the things I’ve been enjoying the most, just pottering around, being outside, doing something with my hands and having something we can all be interested in together.

It’s also been a month since I started writing here, which feels kind of wild to say. I don’t know if I expected to enjoy it this much, but I really do. It’s been so nice to have a space to write in a way that feels more spacious and personal, and to share things in a bit more depth than I can anywhere else. It’s also made me pay more attention to my own life, even more so than usual. You know, noticing the small things that are making my days feel better and having somewhere to bring those reflections.

We’re also about to head into what people here call “Mayvember,” – basically May ends up feeling as busy and full-on as November, especially with school-aged kids, which I now completely understand. Everything ramps up all at once. School events, birthday parties, trips, trying to see friends before summer, getting passports sorted, remembering things like Teacher Appreciation Week at the very last minute while being the class parent for both kids. It’s all good things, but it’s a lot to hold.

So I’m trying to meet this season a little differently. Less pushing, more grace and taking everyday as it comes.

I’ve been walking a lot in the mornings after the kids go to school, sometimes on my own and sometimes with a friend who has a baby, so we’ll just walk and talk for a while. We’ll both have our weighted vests on, and it’s been such a nice way to combine something that supports my body with connection and casual friend-time.

I’ve also been spending more time at the library, trying to use cookbooks instead of defaulting to TikTok for recipes, and generally finding more ways to be offline.

It’s something I’ve been sitting with a lot lately – just the realization about what has the opportunity to resurface and emerge when you actually give your brain some space and stop constantly scrolling.

Because one of the biggest things I’ve noticed as I’ve slowed down, and spent less time constantly consuming, is how much I’m enjoying being interested in things again.

You know, following a thread of curiosity after getting a recommendation from someone.

Going down a rabbit hole and researching after reading a book or watching a show.

Just letting myself explore things without needing it to turn into anything.

It feels very different from how my time used to feel, which was a lot more fragmented, a lot more reactive and tied to whatever was in front of me on a screen.

Earlier this year, I set a goal for myself to follow my curiosities more. I could see how often I would say I wanted to learn about something, or try something, or go deeper into an interest, and then I’d never actually create any space for it.

And if I’m honest, a lot of that space was being swallowed by my phone.

I know we hear this all the time, but it really is wild when you look at how much time can disappear into scrolling. You think you’re just checking something quickly, and then somehow half an hour has gone, and you don’t even feel particularly rested or nourished afterwards.

Or you find yourself reaching the depths of Netflix, scrolling for something interesting to watch, only to settle on something mediocre just to have something to watch to unwind.

I could see that I’d have these pockets of time in my day where I’d tell myself I didn’t have time for the things I wanted to explore, but when I actually looked at it, the time was there. It was just evaporating.

So I started doing something that has genuinely changed the way my days feel.

I created a personal curriculum.